Cigarette ads in paperbacks from the 1970s

Yesterday MobyLives reported that ads are coming to the cheapest Kindle. A scary prospect to be sure–and probably the first small step in the direction of a fundamental shift– but as Jennifer Schuessler pointed out in an Artsbeat post on the New York Times website yesterday, Amazon’s move is the latest in a long tradition of selling ads in books.

Schuessler’s post featured an essay that Paul Collins wrote for the Times Book Review back in 2007, which detailed a bit of the history of advertising in books. As it happens, the modern history of ads in books goes back to the 1960s and 70s and most of the ads back then were bought by tobacco companies. (Collin’s piece included this handy link to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, which has an exhaustive collection of documents from Tobacco companies, including books ads from the era.) But as Collins writes, book ads didn’t start out as an exclusive realm for hocking smokes:

The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock‘s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

This arrangement turned out not to be a boon for Spock–financially or professionally (he was criticized by the American Medical Association)–and he ended up suing his publisher. And while the ethical problems complicated ads for authors like Spock, the same could not be said for authors of pulp fiction and other genres. Thus it wasn’t much later that the tobacco companies began to move aggressively into this new ad space:

The bulk of paperback advertising came from tobacco companies, which were looking for new places to push their products after a federal ban on cigarette advertising on television and radio passed in 1969. Beginning in 1971, the Lorillard Tobacco Company began buying into print runs of tens and even hundreds of thousands of copies apiece at the astounding rate of 125 titles a month, often in pulpy volumes like “Purr, Baby, Purr” and “The Executioner #8: Chicago Wipeout” — not to mention the poetically if unintentionally matched “I Come to Kill You” and “Unless They Kill Me First.” True to the era, Lorillard placed advertisements in 150,000 copies of “Group Sex,” as well as in “Heloise’s Kitchen Hints.” By 1975, the company had spent $3 million for advertisements in a staggering 540 million paperbacks.

While I doubt we’ll see tobacco companies moving into the Kindle ad space, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a boat load of BP ads start showing up in the Kindle version of An Inconvenient Truth.