Critical mass

Molly Templeton misses paperbacks:

So many books that I love first appeared as mass markets—like all those Jo Clayton novels I keep buying new-to-me copies of. I don't think I'm alone in that, as a reader, I grew up almost entirely on mass markets. If the books I was reading had ever come in other formats, I never saw them—with rare exceptions like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the giant omnibus edition in faux leather) or The Mists of Avalon (which I always assumed was just too big to fit in the smaller size). Hardcovers? Presumably they existed, but not to me. Those books were invisible until they arrived in the small, portable, affordable format.