I read recently of the passing of Jason Epstein, an editor and publisher who launched the paperback revolution. When he was 23, earning $45 a week and just scraping by in the publishing trade (I can relate!), he proposed to the higher-ups at Doubleday that they publish the classics in soft rather than hardcover. 

His bosses listened, and Doubleday came out with Anchor books, which provided the works of  Lawrence, Stendhal and other greats for as little as 65 cents a title. Epstein edited Roth, Mailer and Auden, and helped found the New York Review of Books, but it’s the paperback idea he’s known for most.

Before the early 1950s, paperbacks were reserved for “lowbrow, escapist fiction,” the obit said, so this was a novel idea. And it worked! The new line sold briskly, and what became known as trade paperbacks quickly became a profitable arm of the publishing business, much beloved of students and others who wanted a library of classics but couldn’t afford the hardback versions.

So now when I’m moving yet another box of books or cramming one more paperback onto an already-crowded shelf, I’ll say, with only the slightest hint of irony, “Thank you, Mr. Epstein.”