LA Bantam - 10 cents Revisited Part III

I've discussed in a few posts the 10 cent price that Bantam Publications sold mass market paperbacks for in 1940 and 1941. I've been trying to understand how Bantam expected to make a profit when Pocket Books cleared around 1 cent on their selling price of 25 cents in 1940.

A look at today's mass market paperbacks might help.

The latest NYT top 20 best-selling mass market paperback list has ten books at $7.99 and ten at $9.99 (all figures US). Are there MMPs selling at significantly less than these prices? The answer is yes - Harlequin and their competitors in the series romance market. Most of the 12 million books that Harlequin sells each month are in their over 50 romance series with prices ranging from $4.50 to $5.99. Harlequin also sells non-series books at the normal price.

The romance series books are marketed and sold like magazines: a shelf life of a month with most sales outside of bookstores. The books are also shorter than a typical MMP at 192 to 296 pages. And with standard lengths and known print runs for some 80 books each month Harlequin and other romance series publishers likely have the cheapest per unit print cost in the publishing industry.

Bantam had the short books (all but one at 100 pages) but shared nothing else with today's low cost MMP publishers of romance series. And, of course, unlike Pocket Books and publishers today, Bantam neglected to put a price on its books.

Below are a recent 500 page $9.99 MMP, a $5.99 Harlequin and a 10 cent Bantam with the price sticker the publisher eventually added.

Ace Books - March 2007

Harlequin Historical 999 - July 2010

Bantam 20 - 1940

La Bantam Bibliographically Speaking Part I

There are five differences between the many Bantam variants - three for the front covers with text, the illustrated covers for issues 21 to 28 and the ads on the back covers. The three front covers differences are the colour combinations, the "eye of the bantam" and the text font. So far I've seen no differences in anything between the covers for any of the book variants.

There are ten colour combination for the text covers and I can't see a pattern. But there are patterns for the ads, the eye and the text font. So far all books I've seen with ad 1 have a black bantam eye and italic font. Also all books with ad 2 have non-italic font and do not have the black eye. The first pattern is seen only on books 1 - 20, the second on books from the first group (1 - 20) and the second (21 -28). Below are examples from the two patterns.

There are no illustrated cover variants. All have the black eye, same font and ad 4.

Bantam 14

Bantam 14 back

Bantam 22

Bantam 22 back

Bantam 22

Bantam 22 illustrated back

Red Arrow - the Other Red Arrrow

The "Red Arrow" discussed in this blog wasn't the only Red Arrow in the vintage publishing world. In 1950, ten years after the American Red Arrow ended its 13 book life, London's T.V. Boardman Company, Limited started its Red Arrow imprint. As far as I can determine there were 33 books - 5 romance, 7 crime and 21 westerns. Here we'll look at the only one with a Canadian connection.

The Corpse Was a Blonde is a paperback original written by Canadian Horace Brown. Early in his career Brown was a newspaper reporter and editor. He worked as the script writer for the CBC in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Later he wrote plays and had stories published in magazines such as Saturday Night and Star Weekly. He also wrote for two short lived magazines he published, Original Detective Stories and All-New Western Stories.

LA Bantam Authors Part II - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

In part I of this post I discussed the only author that had more than one book published by Bantam Publications, Inc. Eleanor Packer was an employee at a company owned by the  company that owned Bantam and edited six of Bantam's books.

The other 23 books Bantam published had 23 authors.

Book 15, Poems of Passion, was written by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 - 1919). Wilcox was very popular in her time and isn't completely forgotten today. One of some 70 books by Wilcox, Poems of Passion was published in 1883 (Chicago: W.B. Conkey). It was her most popular work and includes "Solitude" with her most famous line:

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."

The first edition of Poems of Passion contains 82 poems. The Bantam edition manages to reprint them all plus the four page author's preface and a new introduction.

LA Bantam - 10 cents Revisited Part II

Part I discussed another series of paperbacks that sold for 10 cents published by Dell. Like many LA Bantam books, all but four of the Dells had been published earlier but not in book form. Three had appeared previously in separate book form and one was a paperback original. Here are two more from the series. They are among the most recognizable and expensive of vintage paperbacks.

Marihauna first appeared in the May 3, 1941 edition of Detective Fiction Weekly. The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches was first published in Mystery Book Magazine Summer 1950.

Dell 10 cent series 11

Dell 10 cent series 33