I don’t know why, but sometimes the last (and the shortest step) in a project takes the most amount of time before it finally gets done.

   Case in point. I’ve been working on the Lending Library Mystery website for quite a while, and only over the weekend have I managed to get the last publisher’s page done.

   This is the website that Bill Pronzini and I have been doing in conjunction with Bill Deeck’s reference book Murder at 3 Cents a Day, which is a complete list of all of the publishers whose mysteries were published almost solely for the lending library market in the late 30s through the 1940s, with blurbs and descriptions of all their offerings.

   The best known of these may be Phoenix Press, but there were several others, including Hillman-Curl, Dodge Publishing Co., Gateway Books and more. Over the past year or more, Bill and I have been uploading cover images to the LLM website for almost all of the mystery and detective fiction put out by each of these small publishers.

   The last two to have been completed are Mystery House, about which some information about the man who founded the company has been added, and Arcadia House, the last publisher to be included and for which cover images are now available.

   Besides Bill, whose collection has been the source of all the cover images, thanks go also to Victor Berch, a tireless researcher into WorldCat and other arcane sources of publisher information.

   Follow the links and feel free to browse around!

NOTE: The two covers shown are both Arcadia House titles.