Lending libraries in Germany

Jürgen from Hamburg sent this to an earlier post and I thought it should pay to be published properly:

Thanks, Juri, for your inspiring blog. It's quite new to me and I enjoy seeing pulp from a Finnish point of view.
Lending libraries specializing in pulp fiction and subsequently publishers doing the same thing seems to be a phenomenon from the the 1930s to the 1960s. In Nazi-Germany they were flourishing as well with only the war putting an end to that. After the war it took on a new lease of life. 220 different publishers produced about 30 to 40 thousand individual titles from about 1950 to 1970. These titles were not available at bookshops, only at one of the 28.000 lending libraries in Western Germany. All that's left now is a small community of collectors. At Ebay there are always more than 300 titles of "Leihbuecher" available.
Juergen
Hamburg