The Mushroom Jungle A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing vintage paperbacks

Description: The Mushroom Jungle A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing vintage by Steve Holland includes paperbacks SF Crime Horror westerns etc Publishers, Authors and Artists definitive history New 1993 Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE SOURCE: The Times DATE: 11 May 1994 A passion for pulp Giles Coren Tip-top the new national curriculum may be, but does it have the spark of lurid paperbacks? The new slimmed-down national curriculum, welcomed by John Fatten as a "tip-top job", has again brought the question, "what is literature?" under public scrutiny. New proposals for English teachers include a finite list of "good" writers, and Dickens, Hardy, and Trollope are ready to reclaim their position as standard-bearers of the nation's literary aspirations. But scan the list for Al Bocca's Requiem for a Redhead or Edward Home-Gall's The Human Bat Versus The Robot Gangster, and you will scan in vain. Popularity has long been a precluding factor in the consideration of what constitutes suitable literature for study. But a new book, The Mushroom Jungle, by Steve Holland (Zeon Books, Pounds 14.95) ignores the prevailing wind, and provides a history of Britain's paperback boom. In the late 1940s small companies, with access to cheap paper and authors who could produce quick, sexy copy, became larger companies, "mushrooming" well into the 1950s. Most disappeared with the advent of television, but some survived. Panther, for example, began as an imprint of Hamilton & Co., which dominated the early pulp market with its famous boast, "We never publish a dull story" Nor did the new companies publish dull cover pictures. If content was never explicitly pornographic, the artwork provided ample titillation. The covers of Big Time Girl, The Virgin Dancer and most daringly Blonde Rod, all lovingly reproduced in the new survey, presented colourful drawings of large-breasted women in see-through negliges reclining, gasping, screaming and being... well, large-breasted. Today it is the covers, rather than the books, that attract most interest, according to Maurice Flanagan, The Mushroom Jungle's publisher. "At Bonham's, cover artwork is selling for as much as Pounds 1,500 a picture," he says. "But people are interested only in the girl art. Cowboys or sci-fi monsters just don't carry the same allure." How the mysteries of the art world seem to mirror real life. According to The Mushroom Jungle, the boom in glossy-paperback publishing grew out of greater literacy after the 1870 Education Act. The same process gave us popular newspapers at the turn of the century and led intellectuals from T. S. Eliot to H. G. Wells into the excesses of literary genocide that John Carey identifies in The Intellectuals and the Masses. Professor Carey describes the Modernist movement as a reaction to the increasing availability of literature to the masses, and sees the production of "difficult" texts such as The Waste Land and Ulysses as intended to exclude all but the most highly educated. Not so Carl Shannon's Lady, That's My Skull, or Hank Janson's Slay-Ride for Cutie. This was genre fiction in its pomp. The big four were science fiction, westerns, crime and romance, but new ones, Foreign Legion novels and flying novels, soon challenged the leaders. And the authors were by no means specialists. The most successful writers, such as Norman Lazenby, transcended the genres at will, writing up to a book a day under a multitude of pseudonyms. "This creates a problem," Mr Flanagan says. "Publishers rarely bothered to register books with the British Library, so there are no records. It gets difficult, as the authors die and the genre fades, to work out who wrote what." Fortunately, just as students are taught to date poetry on internal stylistic evidence, so there are men who can pick up a copy of Owlhoot Triggers for the Law, and, from the tell-tale concatenation of adjectives, pin down its author. This kind of expertise, and books like The Mushroom Jungle, may well instigate an educational backlash, a return to the basic values of strong plotting that the pulp paperbacks depended on. Owlhoot and the Human Bat are preparing for their greatest challenge yet. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. 1995

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