ABSTRACT
Paperback Parnassus is an extraordinary bookstore located in an extraordinary shopping center. Paperback Parnassus is housed in a building with about the same square footage as an airplane hangar. As the name suggests, it sells paperback books—only paperback books. On several miles of shelves, it displays over 123,000 titles, from A: A Novel by Andy Warhol to Zwingli: A Reformed Theologian by Jacques Courvoisier. Skulking around the mystery and adventure department at Paperback Parnassus is a large group of prolific writers, perhaps the largest group in the store, assembled under the avuncular eye of Arthur Conan Doyle, with Agatha Christie as den mother. Economically, a real Paperback Parnassus store would fail. Conceptually, it would be superfluous. Paperback publishing reaches an infinity of markets, and no one store could ever service them all. "Mass market" is the phrase used to describe an important class of paperbacks.
