P for Paladin

   

Paladin - second only to Picador as a publisher's name to set the arty-intellectual bibliophile's heart a flutter...   

Radical, countercultural, polemical, esoteric, transgressive, avant-garde, youth culture ... a feast for the hungry young mind, portions selling at a reasonable paperback price. Eye-catching design.

I have six of the above Paladins - and in the the same covers as shown.

These are they

Dig the inclusion of negative quotes about Playpower on the back cover - "the book they're all talking about!"

Not all of the above were bought at the time, though. 

Back in the day, Picador and Paladin titles were usually displayed in spinners.  

You know what I mean, those rotating wire-metal things with basket compartments that hold about 4 to 6 paperbacks.

One of those commonplace things that were totally part of the bookworm's life, but no one seems to have seen fit to take a picture of one.  At least one crammed with Paladins and / or Picadors. 

They still use spinners in Oxfam but they tend to be crammed with vintage Penguin + Pelican non-fiction. 

Well, after searching online for a goodly while, I did find an example and it seems to be contemporary too: from a Chorlton charity shop - a Paladin spinner, a Picador spinner and a Virago spinner, all in a row. Not the wire basket type though. 

The Paladin and Picador designs aren't nearly as characterful and grabby as back in the day though.  Nor do the books themselves seem be as cool or esoteric. 

(On second thoughts - maybe they just repurposed the spinners and have crammed them with books by sundry nonaligned publishers?)

Now this was the sort of typical Picador paperback that greeted the eye back in the day

This below is probably the more "iconic" Gravity's Rainbow cover though

Owned that edition for years and years ... never read it! Eventually the pages got so dingy yellow-brown I had to chuck it out.

Did finish this slimmer effort though  (following the same principle of reading Notes from Underground but getting only so far into Brothers Karamazov)

I owned and read a Koestler but not this one.... 

Was it this one? I don't remember the cover. 

Or perhaps a primer selection of his works? 

(I remember his theory about laughter - which was convincing. He had a good point about how it's impossible to tickle yourself. And also that being tickled only works with someone you know - if a stranger came up and tried to tickle you, it would not be funny, you'd be alarmed. Tickling works as an oscillation between fear and trust). 

Picador must have done about half-a-dozen of Koestler's... a completely forgotten figure now (although "ghost in the machine" lives on as a sourceless cliche)... Unsavory chap, in his personal life (Wiki-Fear alert)

Had all the Ian McEwan's up to and including Comfort of Strangers 

Read the story collections and Cement several times each....   jejune and creepy in their shock-tactics, maybe, but much more compelling than the mature McEwan (with the exception of On Chesil Beach, which is almost a throwback to the early taboo-tweaking mode in its subject matter but has a more pained adult take on it.... ) . I read them all quite recently again, the short stories and the novella, for the first time in decades, and they still stand up.

Now Brautigan never appealed, nor even really intrigued....  the whimsied titles warned me off. As did his mustache.

Had this Burroughs primer and also Cities of the Red Night... now he's an author that doesn't do much for me

Now I'm wondering if Picador did any non-fiction in those days.... everything I can recall having on the imprint (some DeLillo, a Vollmann.... what else?) was a novel or short story collection. 

Ooh, the amount of hours in my life I spent rotating those Picador and Paladin spinners.... ogling the  offerings, the opportunities for mind expansion. 

Now what is it with UK publishers and the letter P? 

Panther

Pan

Picador

Paladin

Penguin

Puffin

Pelican

Peregrine

Pluto

Palgrave

Polity

Persephone

Pimlico