Pulp Fictions

The Guardian’s Notes and Queries posted a question last week asking why American books, both hardback and paperback, are better produced than in the UK, and often cheaper too. There were three responses; it’s about economies of scale; the US publishers design tends to be better too; the UK has some excellent printers and binders, so stop worrying. I thought I might take a look at the first – since the other two haven’t read the question – and offer a fourth reason.

The American book-buying public is about five times the size of the UK’s, and this does indeed result in savings on the fixed costs of production; research, editing, design, rights, lunch and so on. These savings are more pronounced in areas where initial costs are higher [say in reference quality pictorial art books] as they can be more viably passed on to the individual customer.

Once the book gets to the actual manufacturing part of the process, there are fewer economies of scale to be had; it pretty much costs twice as much to print, bind, transport, store and distribute 20,00 copies as it does 10,000. So when paper and storage are cheap, publishers can order huge print runs of lavish titles by authors on lucrative advances, because the major costs are all “front ended”. When manufacturing and distribution costs go up, the publisher reins in the print runs, and subsidises the jacket price from the front end savings. It’s about taking a firm attitude on product quality and building a strong market among the reading public.

The reason book production in the UK is so poor has, I’m afraid to say, got nothing to do with this. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, publishing was severely hampered by paper rationing, and a lengthy period of general financial austerity. Costs had to be cut, and since the most pressing shortages were paper, and industrial capacity, that’s where the cuts were made. The production quality of the average mass market book plummeted; you will find most second hand bookshops have surprisingly good supplies of volumes from the 1930’s and earlier, signature bound hardbacks from the 1960’s onwards, and then piles of current paperback titles. Paperback books from post war years will simply have turned to dust.

Some publishers took these financial obstacles as an opportunity to become editorially more innovative. Penguin spring most obviously to mind, with their Pelican handbook, King Penguin, and crime and biography series. But most UK houses just adapted their lists to the new budgetary regimen, and then having got into the practice of selling poor quality books to the public, simply continued to do so. When paper costs fell again and labour could be had almost for free in the Far East, printing pulp quality books became a licence to print real quality money. And if you keep up the fibbing about American economies of scale for fifty years, people stop complaining.

Andrew Mishmash