How Mass-Market Paperbacks Rewrote Reading Culture

In 1931, America’s bookselling landscape was bleak. A landmark industry survey commissioned by the National Association of Book Publishers found only 500 bookstores across the country, mostly clustered in the nation’s biggest cities. Two-thirds of U.S. counties had no bookstore at all. 

It wasn’t easy for the average American to find a good book. Even if they could, the price for a hardcover—roughly $2.50, the equivalent of about $50 in 2026—put book-buying out of reach for most.

That all changed in June 1939, when Robert Fair de Graff launched Pocket Books. A former salesman for Doubleday, Page & Company, de Graff had a bold idea: small, mass-market paperback books for just 25 cents. “Legend has it that de Graff knew 25 cents was the right price after tossing a quarter into a toll booth. He realized no one would miss a quarter,” says Kenneth C. Davis, author of Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America.

The idea of the cheap paper-covered book, however, wasn’t new. Dime novels, largely Westerns and mysteries produced in a journal-like format, had been around since the 19th century, but, as Davis notes, they weren’t as widely distributed.

The breakthrough, it turned out, lay not just in the format or the price, but also in placing books where ordinary people already went each day. Across the pond, British publisher Allen Lane did just that with his line of Penguin paperbacks, launched in 1935. The reprints of quality titles sold for just two and a half pence, the price of ten cigarettes, and were available in train stations and Woolworth’s. The book line was an immediate success, selling more than 3 million copies in its first year. 

Pocket Books debuted modestly in New York City with just ten reprints, including a collection of tragedies by William Shakespeare. But de Graff seemed to anticipate the potential for paperbacks. On June 19, 1939, he took out a bold, full-page advertisement in The New York Times: “OUT TODAY—THE NEW POCKET BOOKS THAT MAY REVOLUTIONIZE NEW YORK’S READING HABITS.”

Each paperback measured a compact 4 ½ inches by 6 ½ inches and was designed for display in wire racks that could be set up in nearly any kind of retail space. The strategy was a resounding success. Copies flew off the racks in places not typically associated with bookselling. A single cigar stand in Midtown Manhattan reported selling 110 books in the first day and a half alone, writes Davis.

Like Lane at Penguin, de Graff understood distribution was key. Rather than depend on traditional book wholesalers who served a limited network of fewer than 2,800 bookstores across the country in 1939, he tapped into newspaper and magazine distributors. These reached an exponentially larger retail network, including 58,000 drugstores, newsstands, lunch counters, five-and-dime chains, and bus and train stations.

With one strategic move, de Graff transformed book buying from a deliberate trip to a bookstore—if one happened to even exist nearby—into an impulse purchase folded into the rhythm of daily life, perhaps made while waiting for a train or a lunch order. That change, paired with an extraordinary wartime program known as the Armed Services Editions, would radically reshape the culture of reading in America.

The Armed Services Editions focused on mass-producing small, staple-bound paperbacks that were distributed free to American servicemen and women overseas. To keep costs low enough to make the project possible, publishers made an extraordinary concession: “They gave away the rights to these books for a very nominal royalty,” Davis says. 

The decision enabled the dissemination of more than 120 million books—and in the process, created a new generation of readers. A New Yorker dispatch from 1944 observed troops reading Armed Services Editions paperbacks as they crossed the English Channel ahead of the D-Day invasion of France. A year later, a Saturday Evening Post article described the story of a wounded soldier reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop while waiting in a foxhole to be rescued: “He grabbed it the day before under the delusion that it was a murder mystery, but he discovered, to his amazement, that he liked it anyway.”

“The Armed Services Editions really introduced millions to reading and accustomed them to reading in paperback,” Davis says. “And when these millions came home after the war, they were able to find inexpensive paperbacks practically everywhere.”

These were readers who weren’t reading for study or status, but as a new form of leisure, akin to turning on the radio, playing a record, or in just a few years’ time, watching television. “The Armed Services Editions created a wave of literacy in America,” he says.

Publishers, meanwhile, met the moment. Between 1939 and 1948, roughly a dozen paperback imprints entered the market, including Avon, Dell, Popular Library and Bantam. “Just as there was a postwar baby boom there was a postwar book boom,” Davis says. 

Amid the book boom, older authors were rediscovered as their books found new life on the racks. In the month before F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, only seven copies of his Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby had sold, contributing to just $13.13 in royalties for the year. Watching his reputation fade away, Fitzgerald wrote a desperate letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins: “Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye? Would a popular reissue in that series make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody.”

The answer was a resounding yes. The reintroduction of Gatsby, first by the Armed Services Editions and then as a mass-market paperback by Pocket Books, placed it before a vast new readership, helping cement it as a modern classic.

Meanwhile, new authors were introduced to a wider audience. “You have people like J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Even though their books started as hardcovers, they reached their maximum audience as paperbacks,” Davis says. “Paperbacks were bringing these important new voices in literature to people that would never have had access to them before.”

To make the economics of a 25-cent paperback viable, however, volume was essential. With far thinner profit margins than a hardcover, publishers depended on very large print runs. Profitability typically only began after sales passed the 100,000 mark. They soon discovered that suggestive imagery helped move copies. The 1944 Pocket Books edition of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett centered on the falcon statuette, but the 1947 reissue featured a woman undressing—a clear shift toward more provocative covers.

As the decades passed, it was not only the cover art that evolved but, increasingly, the kinds of stories that dominated the racks. Titles featuring romance, glamour and edge-of-your-seat suspense proved especially popular. The formula worked. Alongside advances in high-volume printing, rack distribution and reprint licensing came staggering sales volumes from the late 1960s into the mid-1990s, a period many industry veterans regard as another heyday of the paperback. 

Jacqueline Susann’s sex-and-scandal superhit Valley of the Dolls sold more than 8 million copies in its first year as a paperback in 1967. Jaws by Peter Benchley, released as a 1975 movie, moved 11 million paperback copies in its first six months. And in 1988 alone, Danielle Steel sold nearly 12 million paperback copies, a high point for the format.

By the late 1990s, the very forces that had fueled the mass-market paperback began to erode as wholesaler consolidation reduced rack space in supermarkets and drugstores, while online retail and e-books offered readers a new kind of portability. According to Circana BookScan, annual mass-market paperback sales dropped 84 percent from 2004 to 2024. 

But for much of the 20th century, the paperback did exactly what de Graff had hoped it would do: It put books into ordinary hands, in ordinary places, and turned reading into an American pastime.