american paperbacks

Pocket

Books

Pocket Books,Inc. New York
Pocket Books was not only America's first paperback house :
it has also been the most many-sided. Gertrude the Kangaroo's company has had, from the very beginning, something different about it, even back when there was no competition to compare it with. That "something different" has often been changed and adapted, not for any want of a coherent style (as was the case with Avon Books), but simply out of a desire to keep getting newer and better. Pocket Books are characterized more by a general impression of care and inventive design than by specific features,

although the specific features are there as well: the dark-red endpapers, for example, which date back to the early years, the Gertrude endpapers from the end of the '40s, the silver spines from the '50s.Most of these physical characteristics were the work of Sol Immerman, who became the house's art director shortly after World War II and held that position until the 1970s. Sol Immerman truly created the Pocket Book 'look'.