Saw this in the Huffington
Post, and thought we'd share it.Did you know, "The first book-dispensing vending machine was built by Richard Carlile in England in 1822. Carlile was a bookseller who wanted to sell seditious works like Paine's Age of Reason without being thrown in jail. His answer was a self service machine that allowed customers to buy questionable books without ever coming into contact with Carlile. The customer turned a dial on the devise to the publication he wanted, deposited his money, and the material dropped down in front of him ... but that didn't stop ... from convicting one of Carlile's employees for selling "blasphemous material."
There are no pictures of that machine, unfortunately, but you can see one of the 1937 Penguincubator, which appeared in London in 1937, conceived by Allen Lane, the founder of (surprise) Penguin Books, and dispensed classic literature in paperback form for about the price of a pack of cigarettes. Cool.
There are others pictures like:
- the 1947 book vending machine called the Book-O-Mat, which
featured a selection of 50 books any one of which could be
purchased for USD 0.25 each.
- the modern day one in Japan that has success in dispensing a
variety of items including beer, pornography, wallet-sized books
and comics the size of a phone directory;
- A Novel Idea at London's Heathrow airport that went bankrupt in 2010.
- a paperback vending machine in a Barcelona subway station filled with Spanish translations of Nora Roberts and Victoria Holt.
- the Readomatic at the Stockholm airport
- and lastly, and most interestingly, the BIBLIO-MAT that debuted last year by the Toronto bookshop named Monkey's Paw, the world's first vending machine to dispense a randomly selected second-hand book for the price of two Canadian dollars. You'll never know what you're going to get!
