If the mark of a classic is that every time you read it you discover something new, then the 1972 paperback of A. E. Van Vogt’s science-fiction novel “Quest for the Future” just might be a classic. Those who read the book when it was first published in hardcover in 1970 certainly won’t recognize this passage from Chapter 15: “A large gleaming machine with an opening at one end was wheeled in, and once again the cycle ran its Micronite Filter. Mild, Smooth Taste. For All the Right Reasons. Kent. America’s Quality Cigarette. King Size or Deluxe 100s.”
A full-color advertising insert, bound directly into the book, brings “Quest for the Future” crashing into the mundane present. And this whiplash effect isn’t unique to Van Vogt’s book. A familiar if puzzling sight to flea market devotees, ad-stuffed paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s now have a paper trail hidden among more than 40 million pages of internal tobacco industry documents archived online in the University of California, San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (legacy.library.ucsf.edu). Read the memorandums and you’ll want a shower afterward ”” or perhaps a cigarette.
The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.
It was a windfall for everyone ”” everyone, that is, except the authors. “Authors were horrified by these ads,” Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said in a recent interview, adding jokingly, “And doubly horrified that they weren’t paid for them.”
Read it all. What I found most interesting about this was that some authors did not even know the tabacco advertisements were in their books–KSH.
What I found most interesting was the quaint NYT tone of the piece. This all was, of course, long before the elite’s attitude towards [url=http://airnet.net/craig/g4c/rant-Smoke.htm ]smoking[/url] had reached its current state of pathologically uncontrollable rage, so it’s likely that if Van Vogt was offended it was, as Collins notes, because he didn’t get a cut of the ad revenue.
I was an avid SF reader in the 1950s; Slan and The War Against the Rull were among my favorites. Good to see Van Vogt’s name in print again; it’s been a long time…
When a member of his Baptist congregation in London accused Charles Spurgeon that tobacco was his idol, the great preacher is reported to have replied: ‘Yes, but at least I’m burning it.’