Derogatory name given to oversize (trade) paperbacks. Derived in the eighties, when McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City and Ellis' Less Than Zero were first published in this format. Black Lizard was soon cranking out reprints by David Goodis and Jim Thompson in this format, thereby allowing themselves to justify jacking up the prices. Many other publishers have since followed suit. Not, in my opinion, a good thing.

However, correspondent Jim Mann spoke to a few publishers about why they were doing this, and passed the info along. He was told was that, for many books that now come out in trade, it's a choice of trade or nothing. For books that don't sell enough copies in mass market for publishers to afford a standard paperback, they can sometimes afford to release a trade paperback. This is for two reasons. The price is one. But the other is that trade paperbacks are not strippable/returnable. Bookstores can't just buy way too many, sell only a few, strip and return the covers, then pulp them all, while getting their money back from the publisher.

Hmmm....still seems fishy to me. Elmore Leonard books, for example, or at least his crime novels, have more or less always been in print. Yet suddenly, they were being released in trade paperback format at twice the price. However, at the same time, both the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald, and the Perry Mason series by Erle Stanley Gardner, were being released in regular paperback size. It seems to me bookstores aren't ordering any of these in massive quantities; they're all, after all, old books now, and none of 'em are going to hit the bestseller lists.