LA Bantam - Book Vending and 10 Cents

In recent posts I've been talking about a couple of subjects in relation to LA Bantam - 10 cent paperbacks and the selling of books through venders (industry term for vending machines). Here I'll combine them.

The Little Blue Books discussed here sold for 10 cents (and later 5 cents and even 2 1/2 cents on special). The attempt to sell through venders obviously didn't work but hundreds of millions did sell by mail order. This method of selling partially explains how the publisher made money at 10 cents - cutting out the middleman. The other obvious way was a very low unit cost. The books were small (stapled, 3 1/2" x 5", 64 pages), looked cheap and produced in the millions. A terrific resource on these books is an article by Richard Colles Johnson and G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Haldeman-Julius 'Little Blue Books' as a Bibliographical Problem", in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Here are two examples of the Little Blue Books sold in venders plus a regular edition of A Voyage to the Moon. Both copies of A Voyage to the Moon have a different series name on the title page than on the wrapper - Pocket Series and Little Blue Book respectively. Pocket Series was the series name before Little Blue Books. The first printing of this book dates from Oct-Nov 1923. These copies are later issues (because of the change in series name on the wrapper) and are almost certainly later printings as the print quality is poor.