LA Bantam - Why 10 cents? Part I

The books published by Bantam Publications, Inc. of Los Angeles (LA Bantam) sold for 10 cents. Before trying to answer the why I'll look at how we know they sold for 10 cents. Virtually all copies of the LA Bantams have no price. I've only seen three books with a price - copies of number 3 Your Health Questions and number 20 the Story of Rabelais and Voltaire have 10 cents in the upper right corner. The last book Red Threads sold for 15 cents. There are copies of the two 10 cent books without a price.

But there is evidence that the books always sold for 10 cents. Each week Publisher's Weekly published "The Weekly Record", a list of "American book publication in the week of the issue." In the April 5, 12 and September 6, 1941 PWs 21 of the 29 LA Bantams are listed. Each of the listings note a price of 10 cents. I'll discuss these listings in more detail in another post. Finally the Bantam advertisements in some of the books let people know that they can buy direct from the publisher for "10c plus 3c a book to cover postage and packing."

So why 10 cents when the two other mass market paperback publishers in 1940, Pocket Books and Penguin USA, sold books for 25 cents? By 1943 Avon, Dell and Popular Library were also selling paperbacks for 25 cents. The large publishers with economies of scale made a profit at 25 cents. They would not have at 10 cents. How did a small publisher like Bantam expect to sell books so cheaply? I don't know.

The books were smaller at 100 pages and more cheaply made with high pulp paper. But Bantam's print runs had to be a fraction of the large publishers and therefore their unit cost was likely comparable, everything else being equal. But Bantam was owned by a printing company - Western Printing and Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. That may have allowed them to produce the books more cheaply than otherwise. Perhaps a different distribution system that cut out the wholesale distributors used by the large publishers helped. I'll leave the question open at this time and come back to these issues in other posts.

Here are two variants for LA Bantam 20.