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.

Historical Research in the Journal of Macromarketing, 1981–2005

“…One reviewer of this article suggested that perhaps any micro topic covered over a long enough time period, and therefore over changing environments, will always have macro implications. In that connection we recall Hollander's (2001) words written about the earlier debate concerning the definition of macromarketing: "History is an essential part of their [macromarketers'] discipline. Macromarketing students are concerned with the relationships between marketing and the prevailing environment.…”

“…Beginning in 1994, there was a definite shift toward publishing historical articles that focused more on micromarketing topics such as marketing strategy and its various elements. This is not to suggest that there were no macro implications drawn from that research, rather that instead of studying, say, marketing systems or the changing structure of channels, marketing historians publishing in JMM since 1994 are studying industries (Rassuli and Tippins 1997;Rassuli and Hollander 2001;Neilson 2003) and companies (Porter 1996;Tedlow 1997;Twede 1997) and among the latter studying retailers (Coles 1999) rather than retailing systems (Kitchell 1995), and even individual people (Tedlow 1997; see also the biographical research reported in the History of Marketing Thought section following). Topics that were almost completely absent from JMM in the first era, such as marketing strategies (Fullerton 1994;Neilson 2003), segmentation (Branchik 2002), product strategy (Tedlow 1997;Twede 1997Twede , 2002Carsky, Dickinson, and Canedy 1998), and advertising and promotion (Petty 1995;Hupfer 1998;Beard 2005), collectively are the most common historical subjects published in recent times.…”

“…With five articles each, the topics of consumption and biography are the two most popular. In consumption, three articles deal with the culture of consumption (Rassuli and Hollander 1986;Holbrook 1997) and consumer misbehavior (Fullerton and Punj 2004), and two articles focus on consumer theory (Mason 1998(Mason , 2000. Rassuli and Hollander (1986) used secondary sources to identify historians' views of marketing's impact on the "culture of consumption."…”

Marketing Practices Used by the Emerging American Public Library System from Inception to 1930

“…During this period, books were relatively expensive, and the literate public was fairly small. Libraries were often attached to universities and religious institutions or belonged to wealthy individuals (for more on library development, see Rassuli and Hollander 2001).…”

Charting relationship marketing practice: it really didn’t emerge in the 1970s

“…There were, furthermore, numerous other spheres of business activity where relational practices are in evidence. These have been explored by Kleindl (2007) in the case of the public library system, the multiple industries (advertising agencies, the Pullman Company, some department stores, and textile mills) explored by Keep et al (1998), and to a lesser extent the rental library business (Rassuli and Hollander, 2001). Since all of this literature is available for consultation, this study focuses on practices that have remained largely unexplored and have never been synthesized under the rubric of relational perspectives.…”