Bantam Publications of Los Angeles (LA Bantam) and other diversions: LA Bantam

Thursday, April 22, 2010

LA Bantam - Book Content

A break from looking at individual books. I want to compare the 29 Bantam Publications books with the early books that its competitors published. Bantam was the third US mass market paperback publisher after Pocket and the short lived Red Arrow. Three other large publishers, Avon (1941), Dell (1943) and Popular Library (1943) started within a year or two after Bantam quit. An analysis of the first 30 books of the four publishers shows :

crime/mystery/thriller    72 (60%) [Pocket 4 books, Avon 14, Dell 24 and Popular 30]
popular    23 (19%) [Pocket 10, Avon 9, Dell 5]
classic      10 (8%) [Pocket 9, Avon 1]
rest fiction and non fiction    15 (13%)

Interesting to note that the first publisher, Pocket, had the smallest crime/thriller/mystery group (13%), the next, Avon, larger (47%) and the last two, Dell and Popular, nearly 100%.

Bantam is similar with crime/mystery/thriller the highest fiction category at 8 (28%) but after that Bantam looks very different. Non fiction is the largest category with 11 (38%) and the other fiction is a mix - 3 pulp, 1 western, 2 children, 2 collections of poems, 1 anthology and 1 popular.

At 100 pages Bantam fiction was largely limited to collections, short novels or abridgements - quite different from the other publishers who had a total of 5 anthologies or single author collections. The other publishers had, in total, less than half (5) of Bantam's non fiction count (11).

Enough numbers. More on content in future posts. Here are early books from each of the publishers.