The Spinner Rack

The other day I stopped at a small, locally owned grocery store with my kids to pick up some beverages to drink. As we approached the cooler, wedged between it and a pretzel display stood a spinner rack of mass market paperbacks. I stopped dead in my tracks. If you follow this blog at all, you know that I love mass market paperbacks. I gleefully spun the rack, absorbing the titles. It was entirely muscle memory. A few thrillers, some romance novels, a few action/adventure airport type books (I've got more to say about airport books, but that's another blog entry) and even a George RR Martin title. I was elated. It brought back so many memories to my earliest experiences with reading. 

Sure, my grandfather took me to the library as a child and I read voraciously, but the spinner was where I learned about storytelling. Combine the the spinner racks at the grocery stores with the wire racks of the department stores of my youth. When my mother would take me along with her to Ames or Hills or Switz's, I would disappear to the aisle of wire racks filled with dozens and dozens of mass market paperbacks. (One time I even snuck out of Hills at Penn Can Mall to go to Economy Book Store. I got in so much trouble for that, she even had me paged.) I would peruse the lurid covers featuring half-naked warrior women or muscled soldiers packing heat against unseen enemies with titles like Raven or The Scorpion Squad. I would sneak them into my mother's cart and read them as soon as I got home.They were books that no twelve year old should've been reading!

My mother rarely blanched at the requests. The books were usually cheap and reading was reading. They were books that weren't available at the library. They weren't literature, that's for sure, but they were formative to my development as a writer. I recently scoured a few of the online used bookstores and bought some that I remembered. I'm going to try and read them in what remains of the summer. To a lonely kid, these books meant the world to me. 

Seeing the spinner rack got me thinking about my writing. The mass market paperback was the backbone of my education as a writer. My earliest attempts at writing were pastiches of these books that I shared with friends. To be honest, I don't know if my writing has advanced much further than writing pastiches of what I love. I have no lofty ambitions about my literary career. I just want to write a book worthy of the spinner rack.