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Advertising inserted into a 1972 science-fiction paperback by A. E. Van Vogt.

Paul Collins, Smoke This Book:

“The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.”

The Guardian, Inside the tomb of tomes:

“The warehouse is extraordinary because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants. When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.”

Zie ook BLDGBlog: The future warehouse of unwanted books

The Daily Telegraph:

“The handsome house in the corner of St James’s Square, which now has 8,000 members and one million books, has for the past 160 years been the best ‘place on the civilised earth’, but it no longer caters for those who are ‘not rich’. Carlyle’s insistence that readers pay only a ’small annual sum’ has seemingly been forgotten, and the annual fee is to rise by nearly 80 per cent to £375.”

The London Library

Biologists Helping Bookstores. Reshelving pseudo-scientific nonsense since 2007.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but some bookstores seem to have a little problem discerning science from non-science. I’m specifically talking about biology books vs. creationist books. Sometimes, you will find psuedo-scientific rubbish such as “intelligent design” books next to such authors as Darwin, Mayr, Gould, et al.”

2006: Beste Grüße.

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