Its price, its format, its weight. When you are asked why you like the Pocket Book so much, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary today, you are unanimous on its qualities. But your stories are all different.
There is for example Magali, who to read “at the doctor’s, on the train, at the garage”, has gone so far as to sew in her handbags which she makes herself a pocket the size of a book of pocket. And Léa, suffering from rheumatism, for whom it is “the only format” that she “manages to hold on to reading time” without having excruciating pain in her wrist.
“Everything became accessible”
There are also the old ones, those who knew the Pocket Book from its birth exactly 70 years ago. Like Yves, to whom his father offered a Jules Vernes every Wednesday evening to read on Thursday, the day when classes were interrupted. “Then it was The great MeaulnesHector Malot and Without a familyBalzac, Daudet and The letters from my mill, Villon, Rimbaud, Hugo, Dickens, Ségur then. And after, the contemporaries: Giono, Bazin, Sartre, Colette, Prévert, Steinbeck, Kazan, T. Williams, Thomas Hardy. Everything became accessible”, he writes to us with emotion.
At the time, The Pocket Book did not have quite the same look. Yves remembers a format “already inexpensive, but with diverse, inventive and beautiful covers”, and above all that the edges of the books were coloured. “It disappeared, but it’s a shame, because it made the paper look more beautiful, which today yellows more quickly”. Yves also regrets that the covers are now “more similar” to each other.
The pocket book, “you can easily make a friend of it”
For some, it is precisely this sobriety of the Pocket Book that makes its charm. Like Laurence, for whom “large-format books are more imposing and intimidating a little, while a paperback gives the desire to try”.
Same story with Michel, who assures us that he is precisely “more aesthetically seduced” by the “minimalist” character of the Livre de Poche than by their “more luxurious first versions”. He adds: “I find that this ostentatious presentation takes me away from the content and the intimacy that I seek with the book”. On the contrary, he is delighted that the Livre de Poche is “easier to handle, to walk around, to store on the shelf where it doesn’t try to show off, or under the pillow. It’s easier to make a friend. “.
Access to quality literature
The pocket book is above all the best friend of the French who like to read in these inflationary times. Its low price allows Katell, who reads two novels a week, to “control his budget”. Already, in the 1960s when Jean-Michel was a child and teenager, the pocket book allowed him “to have access to quality literature without ruining [son] pocket money”.
It must be said that paperbacks are rarely bought new. “Misplaced with friends or even in flea markets, we discover unknown titles in which we dive during a free moment. Recent or forgotten authors then come into our hands and bring a new page to our imagination”, says Corrine nicely.
And then to those who say that there is the e-reader – as economical as the Pocket Book but much more compact – paper aficionados retort like Karell that “the digital book does not lend itself”. The one who admits “the pocket, I horn it, I bend it without remorse” also has a big heart: “A pocket book that we liked, it lends itself, it gives, it can sometimes be recovered. Gradually, the book itself has its own story.