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But what Putnam’s was really after was lucrative Ace Books, Grosset and Dunlap’s mass-market paperback division.

Times Mirror acquired the esteemed mass-market paperback house New American Library in 1960 and hired McKinsey consultants to rationalize its operations, leading to increasing control for the business office and an exodus of editorial talent that included luminaries such as E. L. Doctorow and André Schiffrin.

A year after it was first published — under the pen name Claire Morgan — “The Price of Salt” came out as a mass-market paperback with a deliciously pulpy cover: A glamorous woman rests her hand on the shoulder of a younger one who lounges, improbably, on a chartreuse sofa perched in front of a rocky outcropping as a menacing-looking man looms in the background.

It was a hefty mass-market paperback, its gray and brown cover evoking a geological formation, its thin pages fanned at the corner from heavy use.

But reading my mass-market paperback of “Happy All the Time,” with the big red heart on the cover — a book jacket I wouldn’t have been caught dead with in that MFA program — I wondered if it was possible that wasn’t true.