Revolving, Not Revolutionary Books: The History of Rental Libraries until 1960

Abstract

Small rental libraries that circulated popular fiction and nonfiction for a small fee flourished as sideline businesses in many U.S. and British nonbook retail and service outlets from the late 1920s through the 1940s. Publisher’s Weekly estimated that there were 50,000 of these so-called drugstore libraries in the United States alone in 1935. This article explores the antecedents, history, operation, and influence of those libraries. It then considers this one subindustry’s implications for such marketing concepts as theories of retail firm growth and decline, the vagueness of the distinction between products and services, loss-leader and scrambled merchandising, and relationship marketing. The overall picture is one of very considerable flexibility in both private- and ultimately public-sector response to changing consumer needs and desires.

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