Some Important Facts About the Price of Books" - Book-of-the-Month Club (Mid-Week Pictorial, Feb 10 1927)
The pattern
This still is filed under Price-anchoring offer.
Define
A higher reference number is shown first so the real price reads as a concession, not as a starting bid.
Mechanism
People judge a price against the first number they see. The anchor must be a real comparison or it collapses.
Verdict
We have a credible reference the buyer will accept
Why it works
The ad answers a single quoted objection and nothing else, which is why it can afford to be this plain - it is written to the segment already close enough to have written in and complained. It then does the thing most advertisers refuse to do and argues against its own apparent interest, explaining in detail why it cannot offer bargains and conceding that it would like to; conceding a limitation this openly buys credibility for everything else on the page. Underneath the price argument is a quiet repositioning: the club is reframed from a way of buying books cheaply to a device against your own procrastination, dramatised with the reader's own remembered sentence about never getting around to it. The Selecting Committee portraits import five borrowed reputations before a word is read, and the physical photograph of the parcel arriving makes the mechanism concrete.
Steal this when
Prospects keep raising one specific price or terms objection and you cannot meet it. Devote a whole piece to that objection, quote it verbatim, explain honestly why you will not budge, and use the explanation to move the value from price to the outcome only you deliver.