Babel Clash

I miss pulp.

This doesn’t make much sense.  I am too young to have experienced the age of pulp.  I have a few Tarzan books from the age, but that’s about it.

This isn’t truly fair to the current world of publishing.  It’s easy to look back at a bygone era and pine for the good ol’ days.  But those days weren’t as good as you remember or imagine.  The trick of memory and imagination is that it allows us to envision the past the way we want to, for good or ill.  The pulp era I miss most probably never existed.  It doesn’t stop me from missing them.

So what do I miss?

I miss when books were cheap, when they were less of a specialty product.  I do have some experience with this as a long time comic book fan.  If I may lapse into my whizzened old man voice for a moment:

In my day, comics cost seventy-five cents!  And you didn’t need to go to some out of the way comic book store to get ‘em neither!  All you had to do was walk down to the local convenience store and check out the spinnin’ rack.  Sure, the comics were printed on cheap paper and full of advertisements, but at least ya could afford to buy ‘em and actually find ‘em without making a day trip outta it!

Resuming normal voice:  Yes, it’s true.  In many ways, it was a wonderful time to be a comic fan.  Especially a young one.  When I first collected comics, I did so because it was cheap.  This is no longer true.  The comic book market continues to shrink, and I believe it’s because the cost has put it out of the reach of the younger fans.

And isn’t it the same with the publishing industry?  Aren’t novels getting awfully expensive?  I love that I’m doing well enough and my publisher has enough faith in me to print my books in hardcover.  Divine Misfortune is a low, low twenty bucks (subtle self-promotion at work), but that’s still not cheap.  Certainly not pulp cheap.

In the (most probably imaginary) pulp era I envision in my dreams, books were cheap and plentiful.  They had typos.  Many of them were dreadful.  But they were accessible.  They were something anyone could buy without having to consider them “a hobby”.  Reading was just something people did because it was easy and fun to do.

It’s easy to be critical.  Especially when comparing the real world to some beautiful Utopia that only exists as a dream, a perfect world that never was.  The publishing world has been very generous to me, and it’d be foolish of me to be ungrateful or excessively critical.  My experience with publishers, editors, agents, and fans have all been uniformly wonderful, and in no way do I want to imply that dissatisfaction with my career is the the root of this yearning.  I’ve done better than I have any right to expect.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when I close my eyes and allow myself the luxury, I miss pulp.

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