ABSTRACT
In the 1830s and 1840s, many newspapers began inserting unbound books in the papers in order to avoid the higher postal rate on books. Cut-throat price competition ensued as more and more newspapers entered this field. The big paperback development of the last quarter of the 19th century was the so-called Cheap Libraries. In the 1920s and 1930s, paperback programs cropped up in isolated ways. When Pocket Books started the modern mass market paperback "revolution" in 1939 paperback books already had a long tradition and a high mortality rate in the history of American publishing. In Colonial times, sermons, government reports and almanacs were printed as paperbacks. Between 1777 and 1782, some 190 volumes were published in John Bell's British Poets series. In the book publishing industry, the wartime boom led to paterns of thinking which, though perhaps it was unnoticed at the time, would pose postwar problems.
