Book Club 2025: Fakkelen er tent! by Tor Eystein Øverås

I frequently read several books in parallel — usually different types of books. Like, a musician autobiography, a short story collection and a novel — or in this case, I’ve been reading a book about the history of the “quality paperback” market in Norway.

And it took me two and a half years to get through this one. Not because it’s boring, but because it’s been strapped into the reading apparatus on the kitchen table, and I’ve been reading it while eating breakfast and the like. So a page or two per day, basically. And this is a brick of a book.

So — this book is mostly about two book series published by one publisher, Gyldendal. These series were launched in the mid 60s and were (to some extent) modelled after Penguin and Pelican books: That is, cheap paperbacks that had serious contents. And this is of special interest to me, because I’ve been kinda obsessed about the fiction series, the Lantern books, that I even did a web site featuring those books. (Best viewed in Chrome with sturdy hardware acceleration.)

Love these designs.

See? Lots of good books.

Anyway, it’s amazing that you can write nigh on five hundred pages on this subject (and not bore the reader), but Øverås is successful: It’s a really interesting history, and he manages to avoid problems books like this sometimes have. It’s basically a celebration of a publishing initiative, and the temptation is to start to exhort the reader to understand how awesome and important these geniuses of authors are, etc etc. Instead he’s very grounded and looks at the interesting stuff, which is: How were these books chosen for publication? How many did they print? Did they sell? Who let the designers run amok in this way and create actually good-looking covers?

And the answers are interesting, but also allows the author to create a kind of tragic story: Because at the start, the “quality pocket book” thing worked extremely well, and basically everybody in Norway in the 60s bought bushels of these books. And then they stopped.

Yes, science fiction was included, too.

And then the 80s arrived, and the new editor in chief (who said endearing things like “I’m in favour of ugly books full of typos”) reined in the less-than-business focused editors, and started publishing horribly, horribly ugly books like those above… and then the editor in charge of fiction killed himself.

Fakkelen er tent! (2021) by Tor Eystein Øverås (4.5 on Goodreads)