This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

This chapter surveys how Irish titles singled out for reprinting by the British firm Penguin were presented in terms of the materiality of the book as an object, and particularly in the paratextual zones of their editions. It discusses how writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Joyce Cary, Elizabeth Bowen and Seán O’Faoláin were reprinted, branded and circulated by the British firm Penguin, drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext as denoting the threshold area or gateway to the text, which comprises elements like cover art, blurbs, laudatory quotations reprinted on covers or endpapers, and editorial introductions. It then offers a case study of one major Irish writer, the novelist Kate O’Brien, and explores how her novels were packaged and marketed within the Penguin and wider reprints milieu. The conclusion juxtaposes the publication of Irish writing by a London-based mass-market concern like Penguin with the activities of the Dolmen Press in Ireland. This native Dublin-based publishing house was modest in comparison to major British commercial presses, but would nonetheless evolve into an important force in the construction of an Irish literary culture in this period in its conscious definition of itself in opposition to international mass-market entities like Penguin.