Half Price Books (HPB) is one of my favorite bookstore chains. You can’t necessarily love books without having favorites now, can we? I was scanning through my emails today, and found this neat blog post on HPB, and I thought it needed sharing.
Not only do I love books of most kinds, I have a special place in my heart for paperback books. So, I had fun learning that today, July 30th, marks the 82nd anniversary of the first Penguin paperback being published. And I agree with HPB, though Penguin was NOT the first to publish a paperback, they certainly turned into the cost-effective reading tool it has become. Some day, like most wonderful inventions, the paperback will ride off into the sunset, only to retire in cozy collections.
Read more on the HPB Blog Post linked below.
A plea
So that, a tool created to make well-written, must-read classics reach the masses does not, ironically, turn into a tool for rich people to hoard, auction off and selectively label as “rare”, I urge you to pick up a paperback or two, and pass it on to young readers. The older the better. There is a lot out there on how to preserve books, and I will talk about that later as well.
References:
- The HPB Blog Post: https://blog.hpb.com/2017/07/20/a-book-nerds-look-at-the-modern-mass-market-paperback/
- Image, courtesy, Pexels.com: https://www.pexels.com/photo/book-book-pages-browse-education-267586/