Whether it also transformed the country is the tantalizing question that Paula Rabinowitz asks in her lively book "American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street" (Princeton).
To cover marketing, printing and other overhead costs, it would have to sell even more, although the equation could change, depending on how many paperback copies the book sells.
The number two book on the New York Times how-to paperback bestseller list is — no, we're not kidding — The Beanie Baby Handbook.
Knopf has also reprinted "Julia's Kitchen Wisdom" six times this year, and it will top the Aug. 30 Book Review list of advice and how-to paperbacks.
Thus airport bookstall how-to paperbacks yielded to Shakespeare, Milton and Machiavelli, all of whom students had heard of, but seldom read.
Perched like a baby bird between the index and middle fingers of his left hand, a thin bright-yellow paperback: "How to Use the Science of the Mind".
In Ko Samet, an island off Thailand, the Jacobson family discovered a motto in the pages of a tattered paperback, "How to Learn Farsi in 29 Days?" (question mark included).
-- new paperback, How to Build Your Own Spaceship: The Science of Personal Space Travel, and I have just finished reading it.
THEORIES OF HAPPINESS: As a professional reader, I find it charming and not a little delusional that Gretchen Rubin's "Happiness Project" — at No. 6 on the paperback how-to list after 71 weeks — cites serious literature as one inspiration.
Cheryl Strayed — whose memoir, "Wild," remains at the top of the hardcover nonfiction list — enters the paperback how-to list at No. 5 this week with "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar," a collection of her columns for the online magazine The Rumpus.
