FROM THE ARCHIVES:In his Private Views column on the books page "Thersites" explained his dislike of paperbacks and why a nation without novelists might be a happy one. – JOE JOYCE
THERE SEEMS to be something of a revolution going on in the American publishing world. The era of the “paper-back” has arrived, and authors are writing original works for this cheap format, or, alternatively, new books are issued simultaneously in paper-backs and in hard covers.
It appears to be an economic proposition for the publishers – at least. I have not yet heard of a publisher being found starving in the gutters of Wall Street, and the authors are not complaining much more than usual.
Something like this was bound to happen. It happened, on a minor scale, on this side of the Atlantic many years ago with the admirable Penguin and Pelican books. The prices of hard-cover books are beginning to go beyond the beyonds, and most of us who have shallow pockets would be lost without libraries. All the same, I cannot really say that I like paper-backs. I am no bibliophile – I cast an entirely lack-lustre eye on all this business of first editions, bindings, colophons and so on. I do not mind how a book looks, provided it is not aggressively ugly and as long as it is legibly printed. Typography is a subject of which I am blissfully ignorant – no use to talk to me of Caslon or Bembo.
My objection to paper-backs is partly sentimental and partly practical. The sentimental objection is that I like a book to be a book, solid and impressive, something that looks well on a shelf, even though one never gets around to the elementary business of reading it. The practical objection is that paper-backs bend. The front cover curls outwards after a few days, comes apart from its moorings after a few weeks – and after a few months this fine, glossy production becomes an unhappy and forlorn relic.
However, the inexorable laws of economics will brook no appeal.
The latest Mentor Book to reach me is Highlights of Modern Literature, a collection of essays from the New York Times Book Review.
The Irish, I am glad to say, are in there, pitching. Mr Seán O’Casey has two rousing essays; Miss Elizabeth Bowen looks discreetly down her nose at some novelists; and, needless to say, there is Mr Frank O’Connor. I was interested in Mr. O’Connor’s explanation of why the Irish cannot write books – or, rather, novels, as he puts it: “The thing which makes the Irish novel impossible is that the subject of a novel is almost invariably, the relation of the individual to society, and Ireland does not have a society which can absorb the individual.”
As an individual who has no desire to be absorbed into a sausage-machine called “Society,” all I can say is that, if Mr. O’Connor is right, then I am grateful that we have no novels. “Happy is the nation that has no history” is an old saying. Perhaps a new one would be “Happy is the nation that has no novelists.”