Notebook: 1. Isn’t it romantic?

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

(1) Title page of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, sometimes considered the first novel in English; (2) early seventeenth-century illustration of The Tale of the Genji (Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Lady Murasaki, whom critic Harold Bloom characterized as “having anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist” with her “use of intimacy”; (3) first edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess; (4) first edition of E. D. E. N Southworth's The Lost Heiress

Talking about publishing romance is like talking about publishing books, but moreso. Some people argue that the very first novels were the French romances of the early seventeenth century (“novel” in French is still “roman”). Other now-popular forms like mystery and science fiction developed generations later. Cheap paperbacks themselves had their origins in the commercial appeal of sensational, popular fiction: in the mid-nineteenth century publishers cottoned on to newly literate readers’ appetite for popular fiction and began selling cheaply printed, luridly illustrated newspaper-sized “books” through newspaper distribution on the streets and at cigar stands. As John Markert recounts in Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry, 1940s to the Present, the first US book professional to exploit the hunger for inexpensive fiction turned to romance: in 1854 T. B. Peterson published a manuscript called The Lost Heiress, by a Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, that had been snubbed by establishment houses, noting an unserved appetite for “books at low prices, especially sensational fiction.” It was a hit, and inaugurated an early paperback boom of the 1880s as well as a recurrent pattern of traditional hardcover publishers declining to recognize readers’ visibly expressed appetites. When Pocket Books imitated Allen Lane’s Penguin Books in England and brought out a line of low-cost paperbacks for sale in train stations and drug stores and newsstands in the US, inventing the modern paperback (see our Notebook, “Paperback Writers”), they jumped on the same bandwagon of inexpensive production and distribution outside traditional outlets, in the places where people lived and shopped, an approach now called “mass market,” as opposed to working through booksellers, or the “trade.”