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\u2019s science-fiction novel \u201cQuest for the Future\u201d\u009d just might be a classic. Those who read the book when it was first published in hardcover in 1970 certainly won\u2019t recognize this passage from Chapter 15: \u201cA 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\u2019s Quality Cigarette. King Size or Deluxe 100s.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
A full-color advertising insert, bound directly into the book, brings \u201cQuest for the Future\u201d\u009d crashing into the mundane present. And this whiplash effect isn\u2019t unique to Van Vogt\u2019s book. A familiar if puzzling sight to flea market devotees, ad-stuffed paperbacks from the 1960s and \u201970s 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\u2019s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (legacy.library.ucsf.edu). Read the memorandums and you\u2019ll want a shower afterward \u201d\u201d or perhaps a cigarette.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock\u2019s \u201cCommon Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.\u201d\u009d 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.<\/p>\n
It was a windfall for everyone \u201d\u201d everyone, that is, except the authors. \u201cAuthors were horrified by these ads,\u201d\u009d Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said in a recent interview, adding jokingly, \u201cAnd doubly horrified that they weren\u2019t paid for them.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n