Reading in the 20th century

If you think people don't read books now, you should have seen what it was like in the early decades of the 20th century. Back then, there was no such things as Borders, no such thing as Barnes & Noble, and certainly no such thing as Amazon.com. Bookstores were few and far between, which meant that books were few and far between. And way too expensive for the average person to read. Then, someone invented paperback books, and publishers started distributing their titles to drugstores, neighborhood markets, and newsstands. Suddenly, books were accessible and affordable.

For some reason, a few paperback publishers, the most notable being Mentor, believed that just because it was now possible to distribute serious, non-fiction books on arts, science, and culture to a mass market, the mass market wanted to read such stuff. During the 1950s, you could walk into your local corner store for a soda and a candy bar, and stumble upon Mentor titles like Science and the Moral Life, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, and Enjoying Modern Art.

To complement these deadly boring titles, Mentor usually employed pretty striking artwork. But it was still probably a little too classy, a little too middlebrow, to really capture the mass market's imagination. Ballantine Books decided to take a different approach. Realizing that while you may not be able to judge a book by its cover, you could certainly sell one by it, it began to publish tomes that looked a little livelier, a little more fun and colorful and appealing to the Woolworth's masses than The Universe and Dr. Einstein. There was, for example, The Shocking History of Advertising. Rumor, Fear, and the Madness of Crowds. Love Cults & Faith Healers.

All these books share a common aesthetic. The covers are packed with a profusion of text in various cartoony fonts and usually feature numerous spot illustrations rendered in multiple vivid colors. They are wide-ranging surveys of ostensibly academic subjects, the kind of thing university presses might publish today, and might have been treated in a dry, sober style. In their hardback incarnations, they might have been, but as paperbacks, they become garish, tabloidy, hucksterish, often with new titles crafted specially for these editions. For example, The Eternal Search becomes The Shocking History of Drugs. Call the Doctor becomes The Astonishing History of the Medical Profession. It's as if PT Barnum were asked to design the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
But it's not just the covers that distinguish these books. They're surprisingly entertaining and enlightening reads. Typically, their authors write in a breezy, humorous style, compiling only the strangest and most compelling anecdotes from a wide range of historical sources that are always guaranteed to draw the curious reader in. In The Shocking History of Drugs, for example, the various chapter summaries promise to cover 'weird genital rites, cannibalism, both religious and nutritional, some social niceties on puking and purging and home embalming in the Egyptian manner, amongst others. Even in 2009, that sounds like a pretty irresistable read imagine how enticing it must have been in 1958!