This is another little zine I found not too long ago while rummaging through a neglected shelf.
As hard as it is for a geezer like me to believe, some of you are probably so young that you don't remember the days before the Internet, the days when information about old paperbacks wasn't easily available, when you couldn't go to Bookscans and see just about every vintage paperback cover there ever was, when instead of searching through little out-of the-way thrift shops for years for that elusive book, you could click on Abebooks and find any title you were looking for, make another click and buy it.
What we had in those olden times was zines like Paperback Forum, although this one came along a bit late in the game. It was quite professionally produced, and it had a lot of B&W photos of paperback covers in addition to the articles.
Probably the most interesting thing in this issue, and still of interest to anybody into paperbacks, is an interview with Knox Burger, conducted by Jon White. I don't have to tell you, I'm sure, that Burger quite a career in publishing, especially as an editor at Gold Medal and Dell. Piet Schreuders has an article on Bantam Books. Geoffrey O'Brien has a review of Goodis: LaVie en Noir et Blanc, available at the time only in French and which has only just this year been translated for those of us cretins who don't read that language (that's Goodis on the cover, as you can see). Barry Kaplan's article is on paperback novels about homosexuality. And of course there's other good stuff including Michael Barson's review of a couple of books about Dell.
It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't around what a thrill it was to get a copy of one of these zines in the mail, but, trust me, it was. I still get a little tingle even now when I thumb through one of them.
