Unlike Others

by Valerie Taylor

  She told him what had happened, leaving out the details. He knew, it had happened to him too. He said, "Good for you, kid. I'll get rid of your stuff, it won't bring much but it's better than paying someone to haul it away. I've got a property in the University area, nice young couples going to school on a shoestring, they're hot for good cheap furniture."

  She said, with tears filling her eyes and threatening to spill over, "I want to see you before I go."

  "How about dinner tonight?"

  "No, my girl's cooking a steak. Why don't you come over and share it with us? She's going with me."

  He accepted that, too. "Naturally. I want to look her over. I can tell you one thing now, she's not good enough for you."

  "You’ll see."

  "What about money? I'll split my parachute fund with you."

  That was the hundred he kept for dire emergencies, not to be broken unless actual hunger threatened. The tears rolled down her cheeks. She said with a sniffle, "I'm loaded, but thanks just the same."

  "You're bawling."

  “Only because you're such a fool.”

  Richard snorted. "You know something? This is the best thing that ever happened to you."

  "Certainly, I'm thrilled to death."

  "Seven o'clock all right?"

  "Sure, whenever you can get there. I want you and Betsy to know each other."

  God bless him, she thought, hanging up and hearing her coin clink into the money box. I'm going to miss him. The sweetest guy in the world.

  She didn't want to go home just yet. She wanted to give Betsy time to get there, to find Betsy waiting when she unlocked the door. We can go marketing together, she thought, it'll be the first time. But first I want to tell her how much I love her.

  She decided to walk down Michigan, past the Art Institute, and say good-bye to the lions.

  It was a sunny, windy day, the kind of day that comes too seldom to the middle west. Jo stepped along briskly, shifting her load of books and working tools from arm to arm. Between Washington and Madison she stopped to pick up a shopping bag in a small specialty shop where she bought things now and then. The owner, shingled and tailored, refused her dime. "Take it for luck, Jo. It's been nice knowing you."

  All the good people, she thought. My own people. We’ll find more of them in New York.

  She passed the Art Institute without noticing what displays were placarded, glancing vaguely at the people going up the wide front steps: students, courting couples, middle-aged shoppers, tourists. She turned east on Jackson, past the art students sitting on benches in the little park beside the Institute, making the most of what well might be the last warm day. Bless them, she thought, feeling a warm regard for everybody in the world.

  A few blocks to the east, placid and undistracted by traffic and commerce, the Lake lay. From the corner Jo could see the line of blue where it met the sky. A pair of gulls, veering westward from the beach, circled above her. Their wings moved in unison against the blue autumn air.

  We're losing the lake, she thought, but we’ll have the ocean. And we’ll fly together.

  To her right lay the long platform of the Van Buren Street train station, echoing with the feet of arriving and departing commuters. Red and green lights glowed down the long network of tracks.

  Betsy will be there by now, she thought. She ran down the long flight of wooden steps, her heels clattering, and towards the waiting train.

  ~ ~ ~

  AFTERWORD

  A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America—a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.

  In 1939 a new publishing company—Pocket Books—stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and, with a price of twenty-five cents on their light cardboard covers, affordable for the average American.

  Prior to the introduction of the mass-market paperback, as it would come to be known, the literary landscape in America was quite different than what it is today. Reading was primarily a leisure-time pursuit of the wealthy and educated. Hardcover books were expensive and hard to find, so purchasing books was a luxury only the rich living in major metropolitan areas could afford. There simply weren’t many bookstores across the country, and only gift shops and stationary stores carried a few popular novels at a time.

  The Pocket Books were priced to sell, however, and sell is what they did… in numbers never before seen. Availability also had a great effect on sales, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Book’s astonishing success.

  Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II—mysteries, thrillers, and “hardboiled detective” stories were all the rage.

  Like many of the early paperback publishers, Dell relied on previously published material for its early books, releasing “complete and unabridged” reprints under different titles by established authors. Within a couple of years it was focused exclusively on mysteries, identifiable by the Dell logo on the cover—a small keyhole with an eye looking through it. Many of the Dell mysteries also featured a colored map on the back cover representing the various locations pertaining to the story’s crime. These “mapback” editions became extremely popular and by 1945, Dell was publishing four new books a month.

  The new paperback industry was faced with some difficult challenges during World War II. In particular, the War Board’s Paper Limitation order placed serious restrictions and rations on the use of paper. Publishers began to worry whether they would have enough paper to satisfy both the civilian and military appetite for paperbacks. Manpower shortages and transportation difficulties were also proving to be difficult challenges. In response, some publishers—Pocket Books, for instance—reduced their publication schedules and reset their books in smaller type thereby reducing the number of pages per book. Others simply rejected longer books in favor of shorter ones.

  In the end, World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books—Armed Services Editions, as they were called—were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease the soldier’s loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywhere—in fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.

  The reading tastes of these veterans were directly reflected in the popularity of certain genres at the turn of the decade. In the mid-to late 1940s, mysteries, romance, thrillers, and hardboiled detective stories seemed to sell better. In the early 1950s new genres—science fiction, westerns, gay and lesbian, juvenile delinquent and “sleaze”, for instance—gained in popularity as readers were presented with stories never before seen in print. Publishers also came to realize that sex would sell books… lots of books. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they ditched their conservative and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers
had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.

  Science fiction titles reflected the uncertain times during which they were written. The Cold War was just beginning, the threat of nuclear annihilation was on everyone’s mind, governments in Eastern Europe were falling to Communists, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was looking for “un-American activities” everywhere in the United States. Many science fiction stories in the early days of the paperback revolution were little more than soap operas or westerns set in space—good guys taking on bad guys while rescuing damsels in distress—that were short stories taken from the pulp magazines. In 1952, however, Ballantine Books changed all that by becoming the first paperback publisher to release novel-length science fiction stories that were sophisticated, intelligent and thematically serious. In 1953, Ballantine Book No. 41 was released—Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—and the paperback’s science fiction genre launched like a rocket heading to Venus.

  The popularity of this new genre wasn’t lost on new paperback publisher, Ace Books, which became known primarily for its publication of sci-fi titles. Not content with publishing one science fiction novel at a time, Ace came up with an interesting gimmick—the double novel. Priced at thirty-five cents, the “Ace Double” featured two paperback novels bound back-to-back with the back cover appearing upside-down in the racks. The stories contained within these “double” paperbacks were novellas or long short stories, rather than novels, but the reading public didn’t care—they loved getting two books for the price of one! The format also worked to the advantage of Ace Books, as they were able to combine the work of an unknown (and, therefore, less expensive) writer with that of a prominent and popular author. As a result, the careers of more than a few aspiring science fiction writers were launched via the innovative “Ace Double.”

  Science fiction would not be the only genre with titles flying off the shelves in the early 1950s, however. And, it is unlikely that even Gold Medal Books knew, in 1950, just how successful its first lesbian-themed paperback original novel—Women’s Barracks—would be. Written by Tereska Torres, and based on her experiences in London with the French Resistance movement during World War II, the book was not intended to launch an entire lesbian genre—it was a story about women during wartime, some of whom happened to be romantically involved with other women. The story simply resonated with men and women alike—both straight and gay—and by the end of 1950 had sold more than a million copies for Gold Medal.

  Women’s Barracks also caught the attention of the government, unfortunately, and was singled out by the Gathings Committee as an example of how the paperback industry was subverting the morals of America. The threat of fines and incarceration made the paperback industry skittish about publishing anything that could be considered “indecent” and before long, a sort of self-censorship was in full swing. Many stories featuring characters that lived their lives outside the rules of the prevailing morality of the times soon became dark and punishing, as there could be no happy endings for those who defied convention. Still, the lesbian titles were enormously popular and soon paperback publishers—beginning with Gold Medal—realized sales would skyrocket if they moved from reprints to “paperback originals.”

  This move toward of the publication of original fiction by paperback companies created an immediate and strong demand for writers and provided unprecedented opportunities for women writers in particular. While it is true that some of the lesbian titles during the 1950s were written by men using female pseudonyms, a good number were written by women, many of whom were lesbians themselves. And although they were still required to write within the prescribed moral guidelines set by their editors, quite a few were able to portray the lesbian lives of their characters with a significant degree of honesty and compassion.

  For lesbians across the country, especially those living isolated lives in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed… a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did—the powerful knowledge that they were not alone. With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women could finally see themselves—their experiences and their lives—represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own.

  We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories… these pulp novels, as they have come to be known, available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form, with very little modification, so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the language—the slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some words—appear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. We hope you will enjoy this nostalgic look back at a period in American history when dames were dangerous, tough-guys were deadly and dolls were downright delicious.

  --Kathryn James, Editor

  For more classic pulp ebooks, visit us online at www.vintage-pulp-ebooks.com!

  Love the book cover? Get fabulous gift products featuring pulp cover art at our online store, Vintage Pulp Cover Art (http://www.cafepress.com/pulpcoverart) – mugs, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, notecards and more!

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