THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE
A History of Post-war Paperback Publishing

Publishing, like every other aspect of life, was controlled by shortages and rationing and in that era many small publishers sprang up to issue original paperbacks in the genres - SF, pseudo-Tarzan adventures, Westerns, hard-boiled thrillers, and Parisian smut. Sometimes they overlapped. From what Steve Holland writes, publisher and spiv were pretty well synonymous. The books were cheap-ish, printed on any quality paper, had garishly painted (and usually misleading) covers and sold in tens of thousands, yet almost no-one made any money out of them, authors least of all. Some authors got a living by writing every day and producing one or two books a week; others only produced one book a fortnight in their evenings after coming home from the day job. In some cases the day job was running the publishing and printing companies selling the books. This was the case with Stephen Frances, whose company sold the Hank Janson novels he wrote. However, he turned to Hank after an SF novel by John Russell Fearn bombed.

Oddly enough, although everyone knows how dreadful Vargo Statten and Volsted Gridban were (don't they?), of all the hacks who wrote this trash, only the SF is remembered, and some authors like Kenneth Bulmer and E.C Tubb went on to recognition, while any other SF author of the time (even Arthur C. Clarke) was bound to touch the edges. Even NEW WORLDS went through the pulp publishers' hands. And somehow the Americans managed to avoid this dead hand: Frederick Brown managed to make his name as both a thriller and an SF author.

Almost certainly it can attributed to the conservative clampdown on law and order of the early and mid-fifties which resulted in the pulps and horror comics being so fully eradicated, and Holland has a chapter on the terrible prosecutions of the Hank Janson books. People who want to burn books are keen on killing people: it is no coincidence that Goddard the judge who denied the Janson appeal was the judge who had sentenced Derek Bentley to hang eighteen months before.

The pulps were allowed little say in their defence: Holland, fascinatingly, explores all their intricacies, and at last gives them voice.