I had a surreal moment today in Sussex Stationers, and I was so glad to find that Jayne was thinking exactly the same thing as me. Either I am not weird or at least I am not alone in my weirdness…
We were looking at the books on the racks, specifically the paperback of a Dean Koontz[*] book and all of a sudden all the books seemed to be tiny. They seemed to be too small to be real books, like they were props from a (admittedly large) doll’s house instead.
With a little reflection we worked out why this was. Jayne is a big fan of Dean Koontz’s books and after reading everything he had written she was always impatient to read the next one and so we have his last 10 or so books in hardback. Unlike many authors his books appear with the same cover in hardback and paperback. Having had a book in the house for a year and then seeing something identical in design but smaller just knocked my frame of reference askew for a while. I can remember the same sensation when CDs first came out and how strange it was to see such familiar icons as the Tubular Bells, Dark Side of the Moon or Sgt Pepper covers at 5 inches instead of the natural 12.
Another factor is that even most paperbacks these days sem to be in the larger formats. I don’t know all the names (I’m certain a sister could help out here) but maybe its called “trade paperback” format, anyway it used to be that only a few books were in larger format – Faber, Abacus, Picador for example – but now most of the bestsellers sem to be larger.
The way Sussex Stationers is laid out, we were looking at a rare display where the whole wall had what I call ‘normal’ sized paperbacks, and they were all displayed face forward and that must have a lot to do with it.
All I know is that I felt like I had taken the blue pill in Alice in Wonderland and everything looked smaller.
[*] I think Dean Koontz is a bit under-rated. I’m not claiming that its great literature, but he is associated with the horror genre in many minds. Certainly I always assumed he was a horror writer until I read a book of his, but really most of his stuff is science fiction or at least speculative fiction – closer to Michael Crichton than to to Richard Laymon or James Herbert. [**]
[**] Not that there is anything wrong with RL or JH. I grew up reading The Rats and The Fog and still get entertained by them.
One of the book reviewers in The Bookseller (yes, it really is called that, I expect it to come up on Have I Got News for You any week now) was commenting the other week that fewer books were ow being publisher in the little ‘normal’ format. Only she called it ‘A’ format. The size that Faber and the like use, and which is even drifting onto the previously unsullied shelves of Science-Fiction & Crime, is ‘B’ format. The whopper that looks like a naked hardback is a trade paperback. There is a ‘C’ format but thats just silly.
“previously unsullied”?
All the Iain M Banks SF books were large format, and I have a few quite old Asimovs and a couple of cyberpunk books which are large format too.
Trade format is a pain in the arse! I have a few but my bookshelves are spaced so they will just fit that B format. If I increased it any more I would lose a whole shelf , so I end up with one shelf spaced further for all the big books.
Yeah. Bookselling can be a bitch when you have to keep moving the shelves. I will admit that the ‘A’ format is more likely in crime than Sc-Fi (apart from the rather more low-brow fantasy stuff I read…..Lots of Tolkein in ‘A’ format)