LA Bantam - Book Vending Machines Part I

I've touched on a couple of the fascinating oddities of Bantam in earlier posts - their price of 10c and headquarters in Los Angeles. Here I'll start commenting on a third one - sold by vending machines. Aside from Bantam's obscurity and rarity this is the one thing that Bantam is famous for. Articles, books, dealer descriptions, web sites almost always refer to the machine vending. Here are a couple of examples:

"[LA Bantams] were distributed mainly on the West Coast and sold through vending machines in the late 1930s." Thomas L. Bonn, Undercover: an Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982), page 123.

"Bantam Books of Los Angeles was a perback [sic] series sold only [emphasis in original] from [vending] machines." Piet Schreuders, Paperbacks U.S.A. (San Diego: Blue Dolphin, 1981), page 103.

There is, however, one problem with this - I don't know of any evidence for LA Bantams being sold by vending machines. For example, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever seen a picture of the Bantam vending machine or an existing machine. Nor is there yet any documentary evidence for one.

I recently researched the book vending business in the mid century and found that book vending was attempted at least five times from 1939 to 1950 in the US. The machines were produced and used and always with little success. But no evidence of a Bantam machine has turned up. 

I'll end this post with a comment on the evidence in the LA Bantam books. None of the books mention vending. In fact advertisements on books 21 through 28 imply the books are sold at stores. For example here is the back cover of book 25, Nobody Heard the Shot.

Note "This store..." and "... watch our counters." Of course the books could have been sold traditionally as well as in vending machines. More on vending later.