You'd Never Find. This being the case, a guy with something besides hair under the hat might find he can track down hot tamales in bookshop bargain bins, neighborhood yard sales, and maybe even his Aunt Millie's attic. But you didn't hear it from us. Tough talk aside, it should be noted that the market for paperbacks, particularly those published around mid-century, is heating up. There are many niches within paperback collecting.
Folks collect by cover artist, cover topic, genre, author, and publisher.
And of course condition has a large bearing on the value, with its importance weighing more heavily on the extremely rare and pricey paperbacks. The somewhat disparaging reference describes the cheap, rough-grade paper on which the magazines were printed. Over the years, the usage broadened to include the inexpensive paperbacks first brought out in the late 1930s. These paperbacks, targeted to the increasingly literate American public, were intended as an affordable alternative to hardcovers. William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, William Burroughs, Chester Himes, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright, to name a few.