Suddenly the leaders in paperback production were playing catch-up.

By all accounts, Penguin books should have launched the revolution instead of Pocket Books, but Allen Lane, owner of Penguin, hesitated. Were the majority of Americans sufficiently cultured to purchase high-brow titles or were they limited to pulp detective and romance tales? He had a second quirk: he disliked books with illustrations on the cover. He considered art work degrading, sensational, and costly, but doubted Americans would purchase books without colorful covers. Fair deGraff agreed, knew he had to compete with the pulps, and had no qualms about hiring artists to decorate his books.

With Pocket Books' startling overnight success, Lane's hand was forced; he could ill afford to waste more time getting Penguins into the American market. He hired Ian Ballantine, twenty-two year old who had done a Master's thesis on the economics of paperback publishing, and a few months later added the old master, Kurt Enoch, founder of Albatross but now a refugee from Nazism.

But men were true geniuses, but neither could get along with Lane's arrogance. Their constant feuding prevented American Penguin from overtaking Pocket Books.

The main distributor of pulp magazines, The American News Company, seeing the sales of paperbacks cutting into its magazine sales, decided it needed a paperback publishing house of its own. It hired Joseph and Edna Meyers who had earlier launched Illustrated Editions Classics and had been using ANC to distribute them. Instead of starting from scratch, Meyers suggested buying out a pulp magazine publisher---J.S. Ogilvie, which could trace its roots back to the Second Paperback Revolution but like so many others had abandoned books for magazines. They renamed the company "Avon" and in 1941 joined the paperback field.

Other pulp magazine publishers followed. Quinn Publishing began Handi-Books, very crude paperbacks with stapled binding. A year later, Ned Pines, one of the most successful pulp publishers, started Popular Library---its logo, the pine tree, is a tribute to him. The giant of magazine and comic book publishing, George T. Delacourte, began Dell Paperbacks in 1943; he appointed long-time assistant Helen Meyer to head the new firm, thereby annointing her the "First Lady" of paperbacks.

Enter the Traditionalists

Major publishers could no longer ignore what was happening. Not only was Pocket Books cutting into the sales of pulp magazines, it was also hurting mainstream publishing. Suddenly another force squeezed the big publishing houses.

In 1944, Marshall Field III purchased Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books. This gave him a first edition hardback publisher and the leading reprint paperback publisher. To have a vertical monopoly, he needed only one of the cheap hardback reprint houses, and he had the money to go after its leader, Grosset and Dunlap. Bennett Cerf at Random House, seeing the publishing power Field would hold, moved quickly to block the purchase of G&D. Lacking the funds himself, he organized other mainstream publishers, Little, Brown, Harpers, Scribners, World Book Encyclopedia, and Book-of-the-Month Club, to pool enough money to make a higher offer to G&D. Donald Grosset (who had turned down Robert Fair deGraff out of fear of losing control of his family business), accepted the offer immediately without giving Field a chance to counter.

Now owning G&D, Cerf used the firm to launch a line of paperbacks---insulating the line from Random House's stellar reputation. He recruited Curtis Publishing, issuer of the famed Saturday Evening Post, to join G&D in the new publishing enterprise, then recruited Ian Ballantine, whose frustration with Allan Lane at Penguin was well-known, to head the company. Ballantine named the new company Bantam Books, continuing the practice of using animal logos, probably in acknowledgement of its debt to Albatross.

That left Kurt Enoch to deal with Lane on his own, and Enoch did not have the temperament to do it. In 1948 he finally bought out Lane and renamed American Penguin "The New American Library of World Literature" or NAL for short. To distribute the new line, Enoch turned to pulp magazine publisher Fawcett, whose fame was in Popular Science, Popular Mechanics. He insisted on a non-compete agreement---that is, Fawcett had to promise not to issue its own paperbacks as long it distributed NAL paperbacks.

Fawcett got around the contract by issuing "anthologies" in paperback form, and this led to the founding in 1950 of Fawcett Gold Medal Books, over the protests of Enoch.

In 1949 pulp publisher Almat Magazine started Pyramid Books with William Jovanovich at the helm. Jovanovich would have large impact on the industry and in later years start his own line. Pyramid challenged Gold Medal for the reputation of issuer of the worse written novels.

1949 was also the year Harequin was founded. Originally it published a full line of titles and attempted to compete directly with Pocket Books, but in a few years it abandoned the effort to concentrate on its best-selling romances.

Martin Goodman, founder of Marvel Comics, started Lion Paperbacks in 1950. He sought out "odd-ball" science fiction authors and discovered Richard Matheson.

Yet another pulp magazine publisher joined the game in 1952. A.A. Wyn started Ace Books. Because he was entering so late, he created a novelty paperback, the Ace Double, two complete novels, each with its own cover---one upside-down---that met in the middle.

That same year, 1952, Bennet Cerf fired Ballantine from Bantam, which he had started (see Bantam index for details). Ballantine, with his wife, launched his third paperback company, Ballantine Books.

In 1953, Doubleday finally entered a paperback series named Anchor Books, titles aimed at colleges and professions.

In 1955, two of Avon's top executives left to found their own company, Berkley Books.

The End?

With this explosion of publishers, the market was soon saturated. Paperbacks glutted drugstores, department stores, bus stations, the corner stand. As unsold inventories mounted, houses failed. Desperation to survive drove publishers to ever lower standards of promotion, which only reinforced the image of paperbacks as trashy literature.

And that in turn brought more criticism from preachers and statesmen and forced faltering publishers to confront the one force that had finished off the first two revolutions: the United States Congress.

As early as 1952, many "experts" were claiming the phenomenon launched by Robert Fair deGraff and Pocket Books had run its course.