Pölpið

What if you could trace the French New Wave, Sam Peckinpah, cyberpunk, "Pulp Fiction," "Mulholland Drive," and "Sin City" back to one business gamble taken by a third-tier publisher in 1949? In fact, you can, and without being guilty of too much overstatement. A little, sure, but not that much.

The publisher was Roscoe Kent Fawcett of Fawcett Publications, and his gamble was to try something no one else had tried before. He decided to publish original novels in paperback. In 1950, his new line of paperback originals was launched. It was called Gold Medal Books, and it became not just a tremendous commercial success but a culture-shaping one too.

[...] it may also not be an overstatement to assert that Gold Medal had a greater impact on the content and form of American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher. Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged. Despite that, though, writers -- in TV and movies as well as on-the-page fiction -- as well as audiences are still looking to these books for inspiration.

Gold Medal was emphatically a business, and anything but a high-minded one -- reserving, for example, the right to do with the books' covers what it pleased, which included not just choosing the art but also the title. Still, the writers generally liked the work. Gold Medal dealt with them fair and square, relatively speaking. Editing was quick and to-the-point. Snobbery was nonexistent. If Gold Medal retitled your book, well, what the hell, and on to the next one.

The writers did OK financially too. They were tickled that they didn't have to split their royalties with a hardcover house, and that they were paid instead on the actual number of copies sold. Was it a coincidence that Richard Carroll, the best-known of Gold Medal's editors, wasn't a longterm publishing guy? Instead, he had previously worked as a Hollywood story editor.

And get a gander at some of the writers Gold Medal put into print: Elmore Leonard, Peter Rabe, Kurt Vonnegut, Day Keene, Jim Thompson, William Goldman, John D. MacDonald, Louis L'Amour, David Goodis, Richard Matheson, Charles Williams, and John Faulkner (William's brother).

Ég held reyndar að Vonnegut hafi, í seinni verkum, sýnt fram á það hversu ósáttur hann var við útgefendur af þessu tagi. Uppskáldaði vísindaskáldsöguhöfundurinn hans, Kilgore Trout, gerir ekki annað en að kvarta yfir því að hinir og þessir útgefendur hafi breytt titlunum hans og sett myndir af fáklæddum geimverugellum á kápurnar til að selja sem flest eintök. Og hann hefur endrum og eins kallað Trout alter-egóið sitt. Hinsvegar fær maður það á tilfinninguna að þósvo Trout hefði verið gefinn út í innbundnu leðri hefði hann fundið eitthvað til að kvarta yfir, og að hann sé hreint ekki svo góður rithöfundur, svona þegar öllu er á botninn hvolft. Þannig að sökin liggur ekki öll hjá sensasjónalista-kapítalistunum.

Athyglisverð grein.

Það er hálfgert ættarmót í gangi einmitt núna. Mamma og amma eru á landinu, og Una frænka og hennar familía lenti hérna líka í gær. Þau eru öll á farfuglaheimili hérna rétt fyrir norðan, og ég ætti í raun að vera búinn að hafa samband við liðið.. við ætlum að kíkja í Tívolí og eitthvað dótarí seinnipartinn.

Þetta er reyndar ekki besti tíminn, þarsem ég á að vera að finna bækur fyrir þetta helvítis pensum (og ég nenni ekki að fjölyrða um fáránleika þessa auma prófakerfis einmitt núna), en það verður að hafa það. Maður svínar þessu saman á mánudeginum, einhvernvegin í helvíti.

-b.