Just before Christmas, we bought a couple of "leaning" bookshelves, those "A" shaped things whose tops rest firmly against the wall. One has a desk, which is convenient for work, and I welcome the opportunity to store more books. The two or three middle shelves are most dynamic, in that they can hold just about anything. But the lowest shelf is very deep, and the top shelf -- the one that rests against the wall -- is very narrow. In fact, it is only five inches deep.
A five-inch shelf will hold only mass-market paperbacks, and when I went hunting for some titles to relocate, I was surprised that we had very few. There are no romance novels lying about, as you might guess, and for recent titles in the smallest format I could find nothing more recent that Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. These must be at least ten years old. For older titles, I have a mass-market copy of Harry Hansen's The Civil War, and a memorable student once gave me a copy of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat.
Just about everything else, I discovered, was from my undergraduate days. I have copies of The Canterbury Tales and Cellini's Autobiography. The Canadian courses I took used mass-market paperbacks: Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game, Margaret Lawrence's A Jest of God, and Alice Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women. Some American titles from those days, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, have been replaced in my teaching by trade paperbacks.
Now, if trade paperbacks are soft-bound from sheets from the hardcover edition, there is no obvious reason to elongate Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Yet, I hold in my hand two copies: one small, and one larger. And, yes, the larger one is as large as a number of the "new" trade paperbacks I bought last year. The larger one is more expensive, but much of that, I assume, has to do with the fact that the smaller copy is much older.
Some of the cheapest books you can order for classes -- wonderful Broadview editions and much-less-wonderful Dover reprints -- are larger than mass-market size. How did the old books we mark up, throw in our backpacks, and dog-ear during examination week get so big, anyway?
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