Books-The Last Chapter ?.

In the 1950s,60sand 70s the pocket sized paperback book was fairly ubiquitous.They were relatively cheap and in Britain retailed in the 1960s at between two shillings and four shillings in comparison to nineteen shillings for the latest Beatles LP.Most news agents and tobacconists sold paperbacks and they were sold in automats at rail stations for passengers in search of reading matter.The leading paperback publisher was Penguin which published a vast range from contemporary fiction to the classics.It also had a non-fiction imprint Pelican and published a huge range of childrens books under its Puffin logo .Other paperback companies were Corgi,Pan,New English Library and Panther.All used the pocket book format and generally had brightly illustrated covers by artists who specialized  in that line of work.Sometimes the same artists also produced the art work on  LP covers another key artifact of the time.The art work was often eye catching and helped sell the book.Penguin had originally published its paperbacks in plain colour coded editions ,Orange for Fiction.Green for Detective Fiction and Pale Blue for Non Fiction.By the 1960s even Penguin succumbed to illustrations on the covers.Penguin had originally started publishing its paperbacks in the late 1930s.All these paperbacks are remarkably durable if well looked after.I possess several Penguin Specials from the late 1930s on subjects such as Appeasement and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.They are quite readable with the paper in the pages and cover showing no sign of crumbling.This goes for other paperbacks from the 50s 60s and 70s in my collection.The paperback revolution was even celebrated by the Beatles in their song Paperback Writer.
I was surprised that from the 1980s on-wards the small format paperback began to gradually disappear to be replaced by the king sized format which is harder to carry around and takes up more shelf space and was also more expensive.It seemed that the paperback revolution was over and someone wanted people to read less books.