Many great minds have contemplated the dynamics of large groups of humans.  H.L. Mencken once said, “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”  And Carl Jung agreed, adding that “Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.”  Similar thoughts like these came to mind after encountering several online articles about massive gatherings of humans.  “The 25 Worst Riots of All Time,” from Brainz.org, included some riots unknown to me, particularly the anti-Catholic one that focused on Irish immigrants “Nativist Riots of 1844” that erupted in Philadelphia. 

            According to PhiladelphiaEncyclopedia.org, the local Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick “objected to Protestant teachers’ leading [Catholic] students in singing Protestant hymns and requiring them to read from the King James Bible.”  Nativists, the anti-immigrants of the era, “used Kenrick’s complaints to gain followers. In 1842, dozens of Protestant clergymen formed the American Protestant Association to Defend America from Romanism.  A year later, the editor of the Philadelphia Daily Sun co-founded a nativist political party first called the American Republican Association (later the American Party).  Then in 1844 a Catholic school director in the Kensington suburb that was home to many Irish immigrants, “suggested suspending Bible reading until the school board could devise a policy acceptable to Catholics and Protestants alike. Nativists saw this as a threat to their liberty and as a chance to mobilize voters” and held anti-Catholic rallies in Kensington.  Local residents objected, and on May 6 things turned violent, three nativists were killed, and the next day nativist mobs burned two Catholic churches and a seminary, and some Kensington homes, including the Catholic school director’s.  Things simmered for two months until a priest’s brother was discovered stockpiling weapons in the basement of a Catholic church located in a nativists neighborhood.  A mob formed to demand the weapons, and the militia was called in to guard the church and those in it.  Two days later, on a Sunday, the nativists acquired a cannon, and around 9 pm the rioting resumed in earnest.   “For the next four hours, rioters and militia battled in the streets of Southwark, with both sides firing cannon. By morning, four militiamen and probably a dozen rioters were dead, along with many more wounded.”  While “few Philadelphians were willing to endorse publicly the attacks on Catholics,” the nativists’ American Party swept the local elections that fall. 

            Some large gatherings are relatively peaceful, like when Rod Stewart performed in a free concert before 3.5 million people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro in 1994-5.  But when paid tickets are required, the largest concert was in 2017 when Vasco Rossi played in Modena before 220,000 Italians.  But logistical problems aplenty always await the organizers of the triennial Kumbh Mela festivals.  According to Nancy Levin’s 2020 article, “The Largest Gathering of People Ever,” “The religious gathering at Kumbh Mela harkens to the Hindu myth of how the gods and demons fought over the elixir of immortality, spilling four drops of it on earth which then became the sacred rivers where this gathering is now held. Pilgrims who make the journey and attend the gathering believe that they are bathing in the essence of immortality when they enter the sacred rivers …. every twelve years around 220 million people visit Prayagraj, India for 50 days of celebration.  Every three years Kumbh Mela pilgrims gather in one of four specified cities located on four sacred rivers.”  That’s a lot of extended visits and corresponding sanitation issues.  Dams upstream are opened to flush the normally filthy rivers, and the enormous piles of garbage in town “will take three or four months to clean” according to theGuardian.com’s article “Kumbh Mela: Cleaning Up After the World’s Largest Human Gathering.”  And just as the gods and demons tangled in the myth, Hindu warrior monks are organized into monastic militias at the Kumbh Mela festivals and take turns bathing according to a strict protocol yet deciding the bath order sometimes turns violent.

            Some human masses are wonderful, like the 174.23 million – 53.52% of all Americans – who have public library cards.  And the American mass-market paperback books, and Robert de Graff, who founded Pocket Books in 1939, are two big reasons why our country has so many readers.  Britannica.com’s article on “The Paperback Revolution” states that “Growing from the prewar Penguins and spreading to many other firms, paperbacks began to proliferate into well-printed, inexpensive books on every conceivable subject, including a wide range of first-class literature …. they swept the world, converting book borrowers into buyers and creating new book readers on a scale never known before.”  The revolution actually began with Albatross Books (so-called because albatross is spelled the same in many European languages), a German publisher, who first published modern mass-market paperbacks in 1932, and copycat Sir Allen Lane co-founded the British publishing firm, Penguin Books, in 1935.  Lane’s Wikipedia article says, “The legend goes that on a train journey back from visiting Agatha Christie in 1934, Lane found himself on an Exeter station platform with nothing available worth reading. He conceived of paperback editions of literature of proven quality which would be cheap enough to be sold from a vending machine …. Most booksellers and authors were against the idea of paperbacks. They believed that paperbacks would result in individuals spending less money on books.”  However, Penguin’s books proved immensely popular and equally profitable.

            In 1939 American entrepreneur Robert de Graff was inspired by Penguin’s approach to mass-marketing relatively inexpensive books but one-upped Lane by forming Pocket Books. His books were smaller (4.25” by 6.5”), only 25 cents (his books were glued instead of stitched), and, as Smithsonian Magazine put it, “by working with the often gangster-riddled magazine-distribution industry, De Graff sold books where they had never been available before—grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals. Within two years he’d sold 17 million.”  He focused on “quality literature”; the first ten titles included James Hilton’s “Lost Horizons,” “Five Great Tragedies” by Shakespeare,” Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” and “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” by Agatha Christie.

            The “Paperback Revolution” really didn’t explode until Donald Wallheim came along and edited “The Pocket Book of Science Fiction,” the first sci-fi anthology to be mass-marketed and the first book to have “science fiction” in the title.  Wollheim’s career began in the 1930s as a serious sci-fi fanboy and by writing sci-fi short stories in the 1940s.  However, as his daughter, Betty, stated, “In true editorial fashion, he was honest about the quality of his own writing. He felt it was fair to middling at best. He always knew that his great talent was as an editor.”  No fooling.  After a four-year stint editing paperbacks for mass-producing Avon Books, Wollheim became editor-in-chief at the newly formed Ace Books where he introduced “Ace Doubles,” pairs of novels by different authors bound back-to-back with separate covers.  These featured new authors like Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber and, unusually for the time, women sci-fi novelists like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Andre Norton.  Even William Burrough’s first book, “Junkie,” was an Ace Doublebook.

            In addition, Wollheim is widely credited with creating the market for fantasy genre novels, beginning with his unauthorized publishing of paperback editions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.  He had called Tolkien in 1964 to make a deal, but Tolkien replied that he’d never allow his masterpiece to come out in “so degenerate a form” as paperbacks. Wollheim was offended, did some research and discovered that Tolkien’s American hardcover publisher had failed to fully copyright the work, and he published it.  He eventually paid Tolkien after the author re-wrote his masterpiece enough to get a new copyright.

            The foreword to the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on “American Literary Publishing Houses: 1900-1980,” snootily touched on the early disparagement of paperbacks by noting that “‘Literary’ has been defined here in terms of form rather than quality …. all the forms in which literature occurs have been included, even when the output merits no particular attention as ‘literature’.”  Great writing was introduced to me in the form of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Tolkien via Ace paperbacks that were passed to me by my father’s sci-fi loving friend.  Judging by Sci-Fi’s modern popularity and critical acclaim, literary merit’s not controlled by publishing formats.  When it comes to literary taste and worth, as Samuel Johnson wrote, “About things the public thinks long, it commonly attains to the right.”  Getting the public to think is the real issue.