The Paperback Show Podcast

Show Notes The history of paperbacks is the history of paperback fiction primarily. Little research has been done on the non-fiction side of paperback publishing. I decided to include non-fiction as part of the Paperback Show to address this missing history. Episode 8 covers the history of the Film Guide primarily focusing on the study of a specific film. The show is divided into two parts: first, I cover the rise of the film paperback in the fifties culminating in the granddaddy of film studies, the BFI Film Classics series in paperback, and the subsequent growth of individual film studies which is represented by the Cultographies series of film guides, secondly, I bring in two guests, Kim Vodicka and Cody Goodfellow, to discuss their Cultographies book choice. Kim chose Ms 45, a 1981 film directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Zoe Lund. Cody chose Danger: Diabolik, a 1968 film directed by Mario Bava starring John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell.  Film Guide Paperbacks Penguin was prob...

  This week we cover a type of paperback that was forgotten until the mid-nineties when dealers began to promote and sell "sleaze" paperbacks . They were (generally) soft-core novels with middle or lower-class protagonists whose lives are complicated by sex, status, and the desire for money. Sex has always sold books, but with censorship laws loosening in the late fifties and sixties, publishers began to sell novels whose primary appeal was sex and the infinite varieties of arousal. We discuss the history of this unique paperback genre, how the books were written, distributed and the people who read them (primarily men). The era (excuse the pun) "peaked" in the 1960s when new readers and marketplaces emerges (the adult bookstore). Even established authors like Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison wrote (using pseudonyms) these "sleazy novels). And despite the fact that society looked down on these types of books, a lot of money was made creating and distributi...