American pulp : how paperbacks brought modernism to Main Street

433 Pages·2014·6.894 MB·English

by  Rabinowitz, Paula

American Pulp

How Paperbacks Brought Modernism
to Main Street
American Pulp
Paula Rabinowitz
P r i n c eto n U n i v er s i t y P r ess
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New
Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Cover art: Guy Pène Du Bois, Portia in a Pink Blouse, 1942. Indianapolis Museum
of Art, gift of Mrs. Booth Tarkington, 62.3. Estate of Guy Pène Du Bois, courtesy
of GRAHAM, James Graham & Sons, New York.
Use of Richard Wright’s photograph and notes: Copyright © 1941 by Richard
Wright; Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Richard Wright. Reprinted by
permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978– 0- 691– 15060– 4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935810
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro and Van Dijk
Printed on acid- free paper ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father and the memory of my mother, whose
bookshelves were full of pulp.
Focus on the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.
‘In bra and panties she sidles to the window:
Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself,
With wafer- thin pedestrians who know where they are going.
The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly tilted up.
Why must it always end this way?
A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair
And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her
Into the silence that night alone can’t explain.
Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad
— John Ashbery, “Forties Flick”
Preface ix
C1 oPnultp: eBinogtrasphy of an American Object 1
2 Pulp as Interface 40
3 Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday: True Crime and 12
Million Black Voices 82
4 Isak Dinesen Gets Drafted: Pulp, the Armed Services
Editions, and GI Reading 109
5 Pulping Ann Petry: The Case of Country Place 131
6 Señor Borges Wins! Ellery Queen’s Garden 159
7 Slips of the Tongue: Uncovering Lesbian Pulp 184
8 Sci- Unfi: Bombs, Ovens, Delinquents, and More 209
9 Demotic Ulysses: Policing Paperbacks in the Courts
and Congress 244
Coda The Afterlife of Pulp 281
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 307
Index 377

It’s hard to pin down the exact date when print is supposed to have
Pdierd.e Pferahacpse the summer of 2010, when Amazon announced it
had sold more e- books than hardback books and journalist Rob
Walker, creator of the “Consumed” column for the New York Times,
saw a future for books “as useful raw material for conversion into an
impressive variety of artworks.” He even located “an online tutorial
for using the pages of ‘cheap paperback books at the thrift store’
to make what amounted to wallpaper.”1 Or perhaps it was the year
before, when Peter Campbell, reviewing two new volumes for the
London Review of Books on book-cover design, described the “new
titles on the table in the bookshop, [as] a cast of hundreds,
gather[ing] for a curtain call. Like the chorus girl who breaks
rhythm on the night a talent scout is in the audience, they will try
any trick to catch your eye” because there are too many publishers
vying for customers’ attention. When competition for readers’ atten-
tion is fierce, “the product and the advertisement are bound up to-
gether,” as Richard Hollis and other Penguin graphic designers knew.2
But, of course, it has been more than a decade since 2004, when
Google began digitizing whole library collections and independent
bookstores fell to Barnes and Noble and Borders; then a few years
later, Borders disappeared too.3 In 2007, a professor of Victorian
literature showed me her new Kindle. For a scholar of Thackeray,