Kitten with a whip

Every few months, a very special package arrives at the office. This is a time of much rejoicing. I'll peel off the cardboard and brown paper and, underneath will be Kitten with a Whip. Or Nude in Mink. Or other classics. My workmates are overjoyed. They'll pass the books around, take turns reading the cover copy out loud, and, invariably, ask... do you read these?

Because I'm me, and they've opened the floodgates, I then explain why Fawcett Gold Medals are Extremely Significant and Important.

They're innovative.

Gold Medals snuck out of a loophole. Back in the 1940s, Fawcett were a distributor not a publisher - placing  magazines on newsstands all across America. They also had the contract to distribute Mentor and Signet books from New American Library - paperback reprints of popular hardcovers. Roscoe Fawcett (!) saw an opportunity: the NAL books were doing well, but they could be doing better. He wanted a line of his own: books especially designed for this environment, and these audiences. The NAL contract prohibited Fawcett from publishing other reprint titles, so he went a step further: he published originals.

In a sense, it echoes the famous Allen Lane story from 15 years earlier. Lane wanted affordable, quality reading for train journeys so he set up Penguin. Fawcett knew his market existed, but no one was taking full advantage of it. Gold Medals are far from Lane's vision "literature of proven quality": Fawcett was about disposable entertainment for the mass market.

They approach the 'book' differently.

Gold Medals are made within the constraints of the brief: a working class audience, newsstand distribution, low price, low cost. This meant, as an object, they're delightfully lurid. Disposable content, wrapped in glossy artwork - competing as magazines, not books. Fawcett and art director Al Allard invested in artists like Robert McGinnis and Barye Phillips (go click, I'll wait) to create eye-catching, often wrap-around, covers. Gold Medals had tantilising, minimalistic cover copy and expressive taglines. And they were churned out: 35 books in 1950, 66 books in 1951, and as the years went on, further, exponential growth.

Kitsch is significant.

Gold Medal worked. And by that, they sold a LOT of books - according to Fawcett, the Gold Medal impritn sold over nine million copies in the first sixth months alone. 

Many of the authors are forgotten now, but, at the time, they were ubiquitous. Richard Prather's Shell Scott series, for example. Goofy private eye capers that sold 40 million copies. And Prather wasn't a one-off. It was fairly routine for a Gold Medal title to sell a million or more copies.

This is part of a larger argument, but this publisher connected - as intended - with a significant plurality, if not an outright majority, of the American population of the time. It extended the fiction market to a whole new audience through a clever combination of distribution, marketing, content and product design. The books may be forgotten now, but when it comes to representing what people - real, actual people - wanted, they paint a more accurate picture of the cultural landscape than the 'high' or even 'cult' literature of the time. For trends, values, mores, aspirations: Gold Medal reflected the dreams and thoughts of its era.

They hide progress in plain sight.

Gold Medal wasn't just pandering to the lowest common denominator. I mean, it did. A lot. But also, Gold Medal smuggled in some really progressive thinking. Fawcett published early LGBT titles (Women's Barracks, a fictionalised account of author Tereska Torres' time in the Free French Forces, sold 4.5 million copies, prompting Gold Medal to sign more books with similar themes, from authors like Ann Bannon and 'Vin Packer'). He also published a lot of narrative non-fiction that, behind prurient titles, hid progressive thinking about crime, rehabilitation, sexuality, juvenile delinquency, and other contemporary topics. (Mind you, he also published Flying Saucers Are Real.)

Some are genuinely good.

It may just be a matter of sheer probability, but Gold Medal also wound up giving a start to some truly distinctive and important voices. Authors like John D MacDonald and Ed McBain went on to become titans. Louis L'Amour became a household name. David Goodis, Richard Matheson - even folks like Jim Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut dabbled as Gold Medal authors. (My favourite fun-fact! Watergate burglar and ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who, after prison, became a prolific - and not terrible! - author.)

Which is to say:

I read them because I like them. 

There is, as alwa…sometimes, a method to my madness. The big 'thought' of communications planning is that emotional benefits > rational ones. You can list a thousand rational reasons, but people will just remember one emotional one - and that's how you sell/woo/win/persuade. Depending on which sector you work in, this thinking is either 'radical' or 'obvious'. But, on the strategic side, it is both well-known and thoroughly-proven.

BUT, those emotional responses have to come from somewhere. A laundry list of rational benefits isn't helpful, but nor are ungrounded emotions. I like Gold Medals. Why? I think they're charming and important and they make me feel good (and a little bit quirky, in a hipstery way). Those are emotional reasons, but they're grounded in my interpretation of rational facts: the format, the historical narrative, the covers, the smell, the blurbs... the whole tactical/physical/temporal/personal experience.

We tend to see the emotional and the rational as separate-but-unequal, when, in actuality, the former is a way of interpreting the latter.

Get: Planners like me

To: Write better briefs

By: Connecting emotional responses to the rational benefits that prompt them

Well, good thing I was SUPER late in sending this today, because this happened: The Djinn Falls in Love, edited by Mahvesh Murad and myself, is a World Fantasy Award finalist. Djinn is a terrific book (I can say that, because I didn't technically write it), with some brilliant contributors, and it is great to see it (and them) recognised. Also, Marina Warner called it 'sexy'.

And something not about me and my book-related needs: the Drum's 50 Under 30 list is out. Congrats to everyone: a terrific list of impressive people.