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

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.

LA Bantam - Book Vending Machines Part V

In this post I'll briefly look at the fourth of the five mid-century American book vending machines. O. J. Jennings & Company of Chicago introduced the Automatic Library in September 1939 to sell Little Blue Books, published from 1919 until 1951 by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas. Only a few (22 have been identified - see here) of the 2100 Little Blue Book titles were sold through the machines. They were marked as “Published for Automatic Libraries”.

The December 11, 1939 issue of Newsweek has a picture of the Automatic Library and a brief article which says that the “test machines have been installed in subway and bus stations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, each machine containing eighteen titles at a dime apiece.”

Newsweek December 11, 1939, page 52

LA Bantam - Book Vending Machines Part IV

Here is the third machine in our survey of mid-century book vending machines.

International Mutoscope Corporation of Long Island, NY developed a machine for Avon Publishing Company called Vend-Avon. It was installed in Idlewild and La Gaurdia airports in the summer of 1950. The machine had a capacity of 350 to 650 books, depending on volume thickness, stood about 6 ½ feet high and occupied 3 by 1 ½ feet of floor space.

There is a short article in the August 5, 1950 Publisher’s Weekly about the Vendavon [sic]. In common with the other machines of the era Vend-Avon lasted a very short time.

Publisher's Weekly August 5, 1950, page 574

LA Bantam - Book Vending Machines Part III

Before continuing to look at the question of LA Bantam and book vending I'll briefly discuss the mid century book vending machines that did exist. The first was the "Book-o-Mat".

The second was developed by Dadson Industries, Inc. Dadson's vender (name the industry uses for vending machines) was first used in a NY subway in December 1946 to sell paperbacks published by New York's Pocket Books. In January 1947 a Billboard article quotes a Pocket Book executive as saying Dadson has no right to sell the books. He goes on to say only Automatic with their Book-o-Mat is under contract to sell Pocket Books. There is a picture in the May 1947 Popular Mechanics of a machine which is not named but meets the description of the Dadson.

Popular Mechanics May 1947, page 90

LA Bantam - Book Vending Machines Part II

In part I the topic of vending machines was introduced. Bantam apparently sold their books through vending machines but I haven't seen any evidence to support that claim. Developing and producing a vending machine was and is not an easy undertaking. How Bantam might have done all of this in 1940 is a mystery.

In this post I'll look briefly at a book vending machine that did exist - the "Book-o-Mat". Developed by the Automatic Book Vending Company of New York, the Book-o-Mat sold only paperbacks published by New York's Pocket Books. There is a picture in the June 1947 Popular Science but it seems that production didn't begin until June 1949. I can find no mention of the machine after that and its safe to say that it was in operation for a very short time.

Popular Science June 1947, page 151

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.