These Books Are Disappearing!" - Little Blue Books, 5 cents each (Judge, Oct 22 1927)
The pattern
This still is filed under Mail-order catalog.
Define
A catalog that is the store: browse, choose, order, without a clerk and often without a website.
Mechanism
Assortment as argument. Density, numbering, and an order path do the closing. The book is the funnel.
Verdict
We have a range, remote buyers, and a way to take the order on the same object.
Why it works
The whole page is one scarcity mechanism with a believable reason why: the publisher is moving upmarket, so the cheap edition must die, which makes both the low price and the deadline credible in a way that a plain sale never is. The catalogue is the copy - a thousand titles at a nickel invites browsing, and the section heads let each reader find his own appetite, whether that is Shakespeare, syphilis or Balzac, without the ad arguing for any single book. The minimum order of twenty books is placed in the mechanical How to Order panel rather than in the offer, so the reader does his sums in nickels and only meets the real ticket at the point of writing the cheque. Portrait, facsimile signature and a first-person voice throughout turn a mail-order warehouse in Kansas into one man clearing his shelves, which is why the announcement reads as information rather than as a pitch.
Steal this when
When you are retiring a product, an edition or a price, build the whole ad on that fact - a real reason why makes a deadline believable where a manufactured sale does not. Also steal the structure when your catalogue is your best argument: let the list do the selling, and bury the order minimum in the ordering instructions rather than in the offer.