The Star Money Maker inspired me to purchase my first gumball machine. This small book provides 53 pages of first-hand reports from youths who found clever ways to make money. What I didn't realize when I purchased the book in 1967, was that it had been published 60 years earlier!

As we read comic books in our spare time, my friends and I paid as much attention to the advertisements as to the stories. One of our favorite advertisers was The Johnson Smith Company. They offered dozens of novelties in their full-page comic book ads. Their catalog was crammed with hundreds of pages of offerings—illustrated with line drawings—including dozens of pages of books.

For decades, one of those books was The Star Money Maker. The catalog listing shown above comes from page 355 of a 1929 or 1930 Johnson Smith & Co. catalog. A similar listing appears on page 207 of their 1944 catalog. I hope you can help find earlier and later catalog listings for The Star Money Maker.

Although I was disappointed at first by the book's small size (4¼ x 5¾ inches), the stories fascinated me. It seemed that about 100 men (and a few women) had written to the Hunter Publishing Company to describe how they earned money during their teen years. Rereading those stories forty years later, I suspect that one person wrote them all.

My situation did not allow me to raise canaries, broker furs, keep bees, or rent a potato patch. However, the following description of gumball machine profits got me thinking:

A Self-Supporting School Lad.

I needed money to buy electrical apparatus, in which I am interested, and various other things, so I decided to buy a gum machine. The necessary $5.00 I borrowed of my father, intending to repay it with the products of the gum business.

After I had sold enough gum to make a profit of eleven dollars, I repaid the debt of five dollars, and bought another machine. After I had again gained five dollars, I bought another machine, and so continued buying machines till I have at the present twelve gum machines and five salted peanut machines.

Five boxes of gum (each containing one hundred pieces) cost me $2.50, and as I sold them for $5.00 I made a profit of $2.50 per five hundred pieces.

The machines were placed in various public places, and sometimes ten per cent of the receipts was given the proprietor for that privilege. As the profits became greater it occurred to me that I could be just as successful in the neighboring villages. Accordingly I sent for more machines and placed them there, offering to friend a commission for taking care of them.

The salted peanut machines cost $10.00 apiece, but the income derived from these was considerably larger than from the others, though I did not install any of these in the neighboring villages.

During all this time I did not miss a day of school, neither was I compelled to work at nights. Since the three years in which I have carried on this business I have managed to lay aside quite a large amount of money, which will help to defray my college expenses when I leave high school. —HARVEY GUETZLOE.

Although The Star Money Maker was copyrighted in 1907, my copy includes a back-cover ad for Efficient Radio Sets by F. S. Winger, a book published in the 1920s. The order blank, which fills half the back cover, provides no clue about the identity or address of the bookseller. How could anyone order Efficient Radio Sets? I suspect that some booksellers would rubber stamp their name and address in the empty rectangle on the front cover. Please let me know if you have ever seen that.