Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99% of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap), than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name today—he'd vanished from pop-consiousness very fast). Or "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.