“American books are in general printed to much higher standards than British books. (Ask publishers about that, and they always say that it’s to do with economies of scale: five times as big an audience equals higher print runs equals lower costs equals the possibility to make nicer books. So they say.)”
“A paperback is a paperback; the collected writings of a writer, any writer, have the air of belonging to Culture in the abstract. That’s off-putting. With cheap and cheerful editions it seems natural to move around from the latest overpraised tripe to masterpieces you should have read years ago. This might be one reason classics publishing has so thrived in paperback. Penguin Classics (for whom I briefly worked, I should declare) is, in terms of overall sales and the ability to keep books in print indefinitely, the most successful publishing list in the world. Part of that must be to do with a sense that the books are easy to pick up and put down; literally and metaphorically, not too heavy.”
“Although John Lanchester’s Library of America holdings go unread because of their gorgeousness – like beauties no one dares ask for a dance – there are other reasons to leave them on the shelf (LRB, 19 June). One is that most of the volumes contain more than one work. You might want to read The Princess Casamassima, but it is off-putting to have to take down Henry James, Novels 1886-90, which also contains The Reverberator and The Tragic Muse, in order to do it. Individual works hidden in an omnibus don’t take their place in your memory as easily as a particular spine on a particular shelf. Further, one of the virtues of good, thin paper – it makes a book portable – is lost when several novels are bound together. Hardcover pocket editions like Oxford’s World Classics and Cape’s Traveller’s Library achieved a balance between portability and readability. It is a niche that paperbacks have only partly filled. They are planned for short lives: their paper yellows and their binding makes them clumsy and hard to open. I know the economic arguments, but ‘gorgeous’ and ‘readable’ aren’t exclusive categories. Books are objects that must work if they are to be read. Henry Fitch”