A few days ago, I mentioned Peter Straub here, and one of my Friends noted surprise at seeing books as serious as his in the supermarket racks. I imagine he would give the same answer as to the classic "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?": "Just lucky, I guess." That is, after all, a sign that he is getting much-deserved filthy lucre for his writing.

It also represents what's wrong with the book biz. Up through the 70s the average drug store or candy store would have a few racks of mass-market paperbacks that included a wide variety of good reading. A year after the publication of a new novel by a serious writer such as Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, there would be a mass-market paperback, and if it wasn't in your local candy store, you didn't have to live in a big city where there was an impressive store like the 8th Street Bookshop; there were small bookstores with a reasonable selection--not just good fiction, but serious-not-academic nonfiction writers, such as Garry Wills.

It's not Barnes & Noble and Borders, either. The good mass-market paperback started disappearing in the 70s and 80s before the chains took over--first Barth and Pynchon, then Philip Roth and Gore Vidal, down to John Gregory Dunne and Andrew Vachss--all now too Serious for small cheap books. Nonfiction is even worse; there are a few True Crime and Newage books in the mass market, but even Joe Eszterhas's quintessentially trashy American Rhapsody achieved the spurious dignity of a large, high-priced volume (which is why I refrained from purchasing it). Category fiction, including sf, still reaches the mass market, though some of the better sf writers (John Kessel, Patrick O'Leary) go straight to the big expensive books. Nope, don't like it one bit.