One reason why the demise of the mass market paperback is a great American tragedy is that with them went the custom of listing other titles from the publisher in the back of the book. It’s not only enlightening to see what else was available at the time whatever book you happen to be looking at was published, but often a good way to learn about books that have fallen by the wayside.
I recently purchased a 1968 paperback edition of Jane White’s Quarry, which we will be reissuing in May 2023 as part of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press. In the back, there is a list of 17 other books available from Macfadden Books. “MACFADDEN-BARTELL NOVELS OF DISTINCTION” announces the banner above the list.
This list was particularly intriguing for several reasons. First, there is the publisher itself. The Macfadden name came from the firm’s founder, Bernarr Macfadden, America’s first body builder celebrity. Born just after the Civil War, Macfadden claimed he had been wasting away from working in an office job when he restored himself to health and an impressive muscular physique through a a vegetarian diet and vigorous exercise with dumbbells. In 1899, when he was just 31, he founded the magazine Physical Culture to promote his ideas, and it was so successful that he went on to establish some of the most popular magazines of the first half of the 20th Century: Liberty; True Detective; True Romances; and Photoplay. By the late 1940s, however, Macfadden’s board forced him out and brought in a less unconventional firm, Bartell Media Corporation, to manage the publishing empire. Around the time that Macfadden died in 1955, the firm launched Macfadden Books, a cheap paperback line.
Second, it was an imprint that never seemed to have a clear identity. Although the simple “MB” logo stood for Macfadden-Bartell and the title page always announced it was a Macfadden-Bartell Book, the copyright page always states that it’s just a Macfadden Book. And the lack of focus was always evident in its catalogue. Some paperback imprints were tied to one of the major publishing houses and you could see how titles flowed from hardback to paperback in their lists. But Macfadden’s lists wandered all over the place, from the 1930s to the 1960s, from best-sellers to completely unknown books. I suspect that the chief criteria for selecting a book for the Macfadden catalog was that the paperback rights were available cheap.
Finally and rather oddly, the list omits the name of the author of ten of the seventeen titles. Further evidence that Macfadden’s authors didn’t hold the upper hand in their deals, but also further incentive to a finder of the forgotten. Who wouldn’t want to learn the identity of the author of The Satyr and the Saint?
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the “Novels of Distinction” in the list in the back of Quarry.
- • A Circle of Sand, by Richard Karlan
- Richard Karlan was a veteran Hollywood actor who appeared in over 50 films as well as television series such as The Untouchables.
- This was his first novel, first released the year before, about a retired bullfighter forced to return to the ring. The Fresno Bee’s reviewer wrote that Karlan “knows his tauromachy” [someone had the thesaurus out that day] and The Arizona Republic’s critic agreed that it was a solid introduction to the world of bullfighting. She added, though, that as a novel, it lacked “depth of emotion, characterization, style and polish,” which makes you wonder what was left over.
- • Lost Morning, by Du Bose Heyward
- Best known as the author of Porgy, the novel that George Gershwin used as the basis of his opera Porgy and Bess, Heyward was a white writer who made his name with books about black life, something he became familiar with working as the foreman of a cotton warehouse in North Carolina. Originally published in 1936, this is that story of a middle-aged Southern artist who’s sold out to commercial success but regains inspiration when he falls in love with a younger assistant, it appears to have included many of the worst cliches about artists in fiction: “Artists are different. Their heads are always in the clouds. They can’t take care of themselves like other people.” When the assistant hurls herself out the window in despair over their failed romance, however, he manages to keep his feet firmly planted to the floor.
- • Lions Three: Christians Nothing, by Ann Borowik
- A classic novel of the swinging Sixties, Lions Three: Christians Nothing is about the affair between a Broadway actress (married) and a professional footbacl quarterback (aging). They liaise all around Manhattan while her jealous husband resorts to ever more insane ways to: (a) catch them in the act; (b) punish them for their transgressions; and (c) win her back. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
- The New York Tims’ Charles Poore loved the book: “Ann Borowik shines brightly among the new young American novelists of the macabre and th absurd. Let others sweat to overthrow moral standards. She only wants to enjoy the revolution.” Poore wrote that Borowik “treats the standard plots of modern soap operas’ melodramas as Andy Warhol treats the standard packaging of modern soap.”
- Definitely a subject for further research.
- • Europe, by Robert Briffault
- Europa is something of a warhorse in the world of pulp paperbacks. Since it was first published in 1935, it must have had at least a cat’s worth of lives in cheap paperback editions. The Catholic Church in Ireland banned the book and it was soundly condemned by Catholic World and similar journals when it came out, but it’s hard to see what the fuss was about.
- Briffault did not lack for ambition and some critics were caught up in that spirit. Louis Kronenberger wrote in The New York Times that the book was “Here is Proust’s world spread over an entire continent.” But Briffault lacked Proust’s ability to see the world in more than just black and white. His protagonist, Julian Bern, wanders in and out of salons all over Europe, counting, weighing, and finding everyone but his perfect love Zena wanting. And if that makes him sound like an insufferable prig, you’re right.
- Europa is not helped by Briffault’s style, which reads like Theodore Dreiser without the finesse. [Go read some Dreiser if you don’t get that joke.] So, why did it get reissued so many times? Well, let’s remember that there was a time when Dreiser was considered scandalous, even risque, for writing books like Sister Carrie in which unmarried young women visited married men … in their hotel rooms … alone! This is about the level to which Europa rises, but nothing makes a book more attractive than a good banning. Though it’s hard to imagine anyone getting a thrill from Europa when Macfadden published its edition in 1967, that didn’t keep the firm from cautioning readers that it was about “Sadistic Violence on the Riviera!” Sadly, the only violence was to the reader’s sense of aesthetics.
- • The Satyr and the Saint, by Leonardo Bercovici
- Subtitled “A Novel of the Roman Film Colony,” The Satyr and the Saint is a spoof of the world of Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, and all the stars and denizens of Cinecitta. Bercovici learned about the Italian film scene after he was blacklisted from Hollywood in the early 1950s and moved to Europe to continue working as a screenwriter. The satyr of the title is Rudolfo Urbani, a renowned film director and rival of Casanova. Urbani hires a young Sicilian novelist whom he learns is still celibate in his late twenties — hence the saint. A satire about Italian manners and mores, it is definitely a candidate for further research.
- • Gina, by George Albert Glay
- Gina is an international hodge-podge. Written by an American while living in British Columbia, Gina is about a beautiful American adventuress who lands in the Philippines just before the start of World War Two to marry a Filipino landowner, then spends the war attempting to avoid imprisonment by keeping a series of lustful Japanese officer on tenterhooks. Glay may have been under the influence of Balzac’s Cousin Better, since Gina is described by one reviewer as “a heroine who not once in 400 pages has an unselfish, wholesome, human impulse.” Does she get away with it? Read it and let me know what you find out.
- • The Other Girl, by Theodora Keogh
- Now we’re getting to something good. A granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, Theodora Keogh debuted to New York society in 1937, worked through the war as a dancer in a series of nightclub acts, then moved to Paris with her husband Tom Keogh, a costume designer. She proceeded to write nine short odd novels, of which this is the last. Keogh’s sense of love and sexuality might be summed up by Woody Allen’s phrase: “polymorphously perverse.” In her books, young women fell for very old men, women for women, men for men, and, in the case of The Mistress, an entire family falls in love with a fashion model. Some of her books have been brought back to print from time to time for their shock value, but increasingly Keogh is being recognized as a pioneer of fluid gender fiction.
- The Other Girl was Keogh’s last novel, though she lived for another 46 years. In it, she offers an interpretation of the famous Black Dahlia murder case from Los Angeles in 1947, featuring a lesbian romance among would-be Hollywood starlets. The book only came out in hardback in the U.K., where it put the reviewers to the test. Julian Mitchell called it “Way ahead of the field in the competition for silliest novel”
- But in the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel understood Keogh’s unique talent better: “With a selective calm that would put to shame German abnormal psychologists, Russian mystics, and minor Elizabethan playwrights, Miss Theodora Keogh turns from the subject of the incestuous passion of twins [Gemini] to the theme of homicidal lesbianism.” Shrapnel admired what he called Keogh’s “spare and fastidious manner of writing,” quoting her description of Los Angeles as “an atmosphere at once hysterical and languid.”
- Whether you choose The Other Girl or one of Theodora Keogh’s other books, she work is very much worth a try.
- • The Stockade, by Kenneth Lamott
- Originally published in 1952, The Stockade may be the only novel of the war in the Pacific to look at how the Americans treated the Japanese as prisoners. A veteran of Tinian and Okinawa, Lamott spent fifteen years living in Tokyo as the son of an American missionary, so he came to the war, and to the experience of writing this novel, with a far different understanding that the average G. I.. In the book, a Marine lieutenant struggles to maintain order over a compound of 5,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. He shows how poorly equipped combat soldiers are to act as prison guards, and how the dynamic between prisoner and captor leads to the same kind of brutality that American prisoners experienced at the hands of the Japanese. Lamott was the father of the poet Anne Lamott.
- • Catherine & Co., by Edouard de Segonzac
- A translation of a French novel, Catherine & Co. is a tale about the commerce of love (or the love of commerce). A sexy young Parisian sets up a cartel with some of her wealthy lovers. The book was later made into a 1975 French comedy by the same name starring Jane Birkin and Patrick Dewaere — which would have pleased de Segonzac, who spent most of his life working as a film executive in France and the U.S..
