LA Bantam and Book Vending Machines Part VII

Article continued from part VI

At this point I began to wonder if the LA Bantam vender existed. I could find no one who had seen a machine, no documentary evidence for it and the only source for information on LA Bantam appears to be the 40 year old memories of someone who worked at Dell but it isn’t clear if he worked at Bantam.

The next obvious place to look was the books which, except for the last one, have Bantam house ads on the back cover. There is also an ad on page 100 of some of the books. One of the ads on the back cover, after a list of LA Bantams, states “this store aims to have available at all times good books…at the lowest possible price.” The ad on page 100 states “look for these titles where you bought this book.” There is no mention of vending machines. The message is that the books were sold in the traditional places – bookstores, drug and other stores, newsstands. There are copies of LA Bantams with a red “10c” in the upper right hand corner of the front cover which must have been added by the publisher. If sold only in a vender the “10c” wouldn’t have been necessary. It is possible that these copies were sold in stores and on newsstands either simultaneously with or after books sold in venders but I believe the “10c” was added because Bantam learned that store and newsstand customers didn’t know the books were 10 cents and not 25 cents.

I learned when researching my book vender article that developing, producing and servicing a vending machine is not a simple undertaking. Large established companies like Pocket and Avon joined with vending machine companies to produce their short-lived machines to supplement traditional book selling methods. Little Blue Books was looking to replace the faltering mail order business with vending but it failed as well. It doesn’t seem to me credible that a small company like Bantam would choose vending, an expensive and complicated distribution method to put in place, first thing out of the gate.

So until a LA Bantam vender shows up I can only conclude that it is a chimerical machine.

LA Bantam 9 back

LA Bantam 9 with 10 cent sticker

LA Bantam 18

LA Bantam 23

LA Bantam 25

LA Bantam and Book Vending Machines Part VI

Paperback Parade 77 recently published an article of mine about Bantam Publications  and its vending machine. The article is my final word on the subject (unless new evidence shows up) and I'm going to post it here. I'll use two posts.

[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 Mass Market Paperbacks, p. 123.

Bantam Books of Los Angeles was a perback [sic] series sold only [emphasis in original] from [vending] machines.
     Piet Schreuders, Paperback U.S.A.: A Graphic History, 1939 – 1959, p. 103.

When I began researching my article (see Paperback Parade 76) on book venders (industry term for vending machines) I expected that the Bantam Publications of Los Angeles vender would be an important part of the article. Here I’ll explain why a LA Bantam vender was not in the article.

Five of the six American machines discussed in the book vender article were noted in Billboard magazine so this was an obvious place to start researching the LA Bantam vender. I looked through the December 1939 to July 1941 issues but found nothing on the machine. Next I tried Publisher’s Weekly which had articles from time to time about book venders but nothing again. I asked some long time LA Bantam collectors if they had ever seen a vender or heard of anyone having one. Neither of them had.

The first mention of LA Bantam vending that I found is an article by Paul Payne in Collecting Paperbacks? volume one, number three. He acknowledges the help of Bill Lyles for the information in the article. This is William H. Lyles whose book Putting Dell on the Map: A History of Dell Paperbacks was published in 1983. In a paragraph on page six about LA Bantam we learn that “the books were designed for sale in vending machines.” His source for this and other information about LA Bantam is a letter dated June 1978 from Lou Nielsen who is described as working on Dell Books from 1944 to 1951, editing humour books and assisting Lloyd E. Smith, the editor at Dell. Smith had also been the editor at LA Bantam. The only source that Bonn and Schreuders give for their information about LA Bantam is Shreuders mentioning Paul Payne. The article on LA Bantam in Allen Billy Crider’s Mass Market Publishing in America says “LA Bantams apparently were intended for distribution through the unusual medium of vending machines.” The article provides no sources. All the books mentioned here were published from 1981 to 1983, after the Payne article was published. The only clear source for the information about LA Bantam in the article and books is the letter from the now deceased (1979) Lou Nielsen.

LA Bantam 14

LA Bantam 15

LA Bantam 20

LA Bantam 21

LA Bantam 22

Red Arrow - Murder-on-Hudson

The second book published by Red Arrow Books is Murder-on-Hudson by Jennifer Jones, first published New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937. Pseudonym of Margaret Lane (1907 – 1994) and Enid Johnson (1892 – 1969).

Murder-on-Hudson is 288 pages long and is 111 mm (4 3/8") wide by 179 mm (7 1/16") tall, the same size as the early Penguins. The page collation is:

[1] half-title,
[2] BY THE SAME AUTHOR [list of one book],
[3] title page,
[4] copyright page,
[5] about Red Arrow Books,
[6] "The persons, places ... fictitious.",
7-8 contents,
[9] "Sworn Statement",
[10] blank,
11-280 Murder-on-Hudson,
[281-288] blank.

The copyright date is 1939.

There are four variant covers: two text, a "Book Club" edition and an illustrated one. One text version has a red spine and back cover, the other a brown spine and back cover.