Donald Clarke: The B&B paperback is dead

It is nearly the end of silly season. But there is still time for one more misty-eyed piece about summers long gone. Bored walks on pebbled beaches. Easing your knee against the "penny falls" machine and hoping coins cascade before it tilts. Eskimo bars. Lemon Fanta. Tunnock's teacakes. Hey, we're in one of those spoken-word Van Morrison laments from the 1980s. Gravy rings! Potted herrings from Cushendun! Why can't it be like this forever?

Have we mentioned the classic B&B thumbed paperback yet? This forgotten genre will need some explanation for younger readers. From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, every Irish bed and breakfast – more humble affairs than the lobster-pâté emporia we now find by shingled beaches – contained several bookshelves stuffed with recent mainstream paperbacks. Some were bought by the proprietor. More had been left by former guests. You rarely encountered the fiction of Philip Roth. Visitors need look elsewhere for Thomas Pynchon's experimental doorstops. It was all James Herriot and Alistair MacLean and . . .

Let us make use of another template from Van Morrison. Rave on John Donne, from the 1983 album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, finds the ever-cheery bard talking us through some of his literary inspirations. You may recall a lovely version by President Michael D Higgins just last year. "Rave on, Walt Whitman, nose down in wet grass . . . Rave on Kahlil Gibran, Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh." And so forth.

Rave on, Dick Francis. With your brave tales of blackmailed jockeys discharging revolvers amid the weeping hedges of Newmarket. Rave on! Rave on! Rave on, Miss Georgette Heyer. Tell us about wild passions between Regency cads and feisty daughters of bankrupt viscounts. Rave on! Rave on! Rave on, Wilbur Smith. Brave were the priapic white hunters of South Africa in the days when that sort of thing was less frowned upon. Rave on! Rave on! Rave on, Catherine Cookson. The miserable poor of Durham rise from sooty streets to achieve an only slightly less miserable epiphany. Rave on, Rave on!

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There were more. On a day when hurricanes battered the whitewash in Ballybunion, you might take shelter with one of Walter Macken’s rollicking historical novels. That late Galwegian is still admired, but few contemporary readers realise quite how popular his books once were.

I can still conjure up the scuffed Pan edition of Rain on the Wind – a tale of fishing folk in post-independence Ireland – that, during the one-channel years, sat between a Hammond Innes and an Arthur Hailey on a bookshelf in Courtown. A sultry girl with long Silvikrin hair peers over her shoulder through heavily made-up eyes. There are fishing nets in the background, but they suggest a chic Soho seafood restaurant rather than a brine-encrusted corner of the west coast.

That was how book covers rolled in the 1970s. Wuthering Heights was marketed in the manner of a Flake commercial. Popular editions of Madame Bovary looked to be offering the same thrills as Harold Robbins (a bit too racy for most Irish B&B shelves). Rave on, Walter Macken.

If you were, however, dressing a film set in a mid-1970s bed and breakfast, the author to go for would surely be Sven Hassel. Francis, Heyer, Macken and the rest still have resonance, but the war novelist – by some measures, second only to Hans Christian Anderson among bestselling Danish writers – has now become as much a passed-over signifier of 1970s pop culture as clackers, Lieutenant Pigeon and The Black and White Minstrel Show. Were his books maybe a little too indecently fascinated with the Third Reich? Scandals about Hassel's own wartime past did not help his reputation. The lurid covers, nonetheless, do for some of us what Proust's soggy biscuits did for that cork-lined author.

This was a last golden age for the mass-market paperback. With fewer distractions about, it was still expected that any half-literate person would always have a book “on the go”. We still have popular literary sensations today, but in the 1960s and 1970s novels sold like pop singles when pop singles sold by the hundredweight. Publishers such as Pan, Corgi, Fontana, Panther and New English Library hustled with a brash vigour that has since gone out of fashion.

In later years, the likes of Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, John Grisham and Dan Brown did still shift paperbacks in their millions. The notion of the book as an inevitable companion – "What's on your bedside table?" – had, however, withered long before the smartphone became the distraction of choice on public transport.

And holiday accommodation changed. The bland hotel chains will not tolerate the littering of public spaces with Len Deighton thrillers or Mills & Boon romances. The "boutique" establishments prefer vintage hardbacks selected for the colour of their spines.

Forget it. The B&B paperback is as dead as Chaucer. You look away for 40 years or so and this happens.