My Bantam Headache

A2048                Q2048

A2284               T2284

S5336             Another S5336

S2643                   F2643

But, perhaps I digress.

Anyway, the Database is on my computer. The list of books, therefore, is computer-sorted. Now, the printing order of Bantam books follows the sequence of the books' numbers. However, they often used letter prefixes to designate books by price, and in many cases, genre. This was common at other publishing houses (at least as far as price-prefixing goes) ... Gold Medal and Signet, in particular.

BUT ... Bantam had no fewer than 38 lettered prefixes (many of those were double-letter prefixes, of course -- otherwise, they would have had to stop at just 26), plus there were three separate numbered groups without prefixes. I try to update the Bantam folder each spring or early summer, which entails picking the books out of those 41 groups and placing them in their proper sequential order to show website visitors.

That task is daunting enough.

But, as if to console me in the fact that not even the publisher itself could keep track of all this, I have discovered (mostly courtesy of bewildered scan contributors) that duplicated book numbers are so numerous that I can't even count them all. Most of the duplications seemed to strike in the 1960's in the "2000's" numbers, but there were some later ones, too.

There was also a group of books beginning with zeroes, and some collectors seem to believe, for example, that Bantam Q2048 SHOULD have been numbered 02048. Maybe the "tail" of the capital "Q" kept creeping in there by mistake. Anyway, there is also a completely different book numbered A2048, which is just one of the many, many duplicated designations.

(My thanks and sympathy for Brian Maginnity, who suffered with this dilemma as well over the past several months.)

(Brian submitted all the scans on this page except A2048)