Thomas L. Bonn papers, 1935-1983, bulk 1939-1941

While serving during the 1970s and 1980s as a librarian at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, Thomas L. Bonn wrote regularly on the history of paperback books. In addition to co-editing the journal "Paperback Quarterly: A Journal of Mass-Market Paperback History", Bonn wrote a number of articles on paperback history and an authoritative book titled "Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass-Market Paperbacks" (Penguin, 1982). These research files contain some of the source materials that Bonn drew upon for these studies.

For Bonn, no single company in American publishing history deserves more credit for bringing mass-market paperbacks to American bookshelves than Pocket Books, a New-York based company that released its first book list in June 1939. To be sure, as Bonn explains in Under Cover, paperback books had existed previously. German and English publishers had begun experimenting with small paperback books as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing either on dime-novel fiction or literary titles, however, those publishers never reached mass audiences. Such English publishers as Albatross and Penguin Books began reaching wider audiences in the 1930s, and Pocket Books soon extended their model of selling popular titles at low cost by adding a few key innovations.

Pocket Books' principal innovations centered around its decision to produce and distribute books in the style of magazines, a development that reflected the knowledge and experience of the company's founder, Robert De Graff. Before founding Pocket Books in 1938, De Graff had worked for fourteen years selling hardback books, reprints, and magazines. Pocket Books accordingly printed large volumes of books at high speeds and selected titles that appealed to general literary tastes, sometimes publishing books related to popular films. Releasing between five and ten new books every month, De Graff distributed this steady stream of paperbacks through previously untapped outlets, such as department stores, newsstands, chain stores such as Sears, and eventually drug stores and grocery stores. In wartime, Pocket Books established distribution agreements with the Armed Services. These innovations in distribution, Bonn suggests, marked Pocket Books as the first "mass market" paperback publisher in the United States.