Heaveninawildflower

librarycompany:

When your bookie is actually a book lover… 

G.G. Evans combined a retail shop and lottery to sell remaindered books. Each purchase came with a free “gift” that was chosen randomly by an Evans employee. The gifts had a purported value of twenty-five cents to one hundred dollars, but most were just cheap trinkets. For the customer, there was always a tiny chance that buying an inexpensive book would result in getting one of the most valuable gifts. In some ways it was similar to gambling, and gift book establishments went to great lengths in their catalogs to defend the morality of their operations. 

Packing-Room in G.G. Evans’s Great Gift Book Establishment, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, ca. 1860).