<i> Flash! </i> That’s How Fast the Last Herald Went

For Adolph Botello, Thursday’s newspaper run should have been just another trip to the coin box: Drop in a quarter, grab the paper, go back to work.

Instead, it became a protracted hunt for the city’s latest treasure--the last edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

“I’ve been driving up and down the streets, trying to find a copy of the newspaper,” said Botello, sliding the last four copies out of a coin box across the street from the newspaper’s nearly deserted office building. “The racks were all empty. There aren’t many left.”

Indeed, almost as soon as copies of the elusive edition hit the streets Thursday morning, souvenir seekers from Los Angeles and Orange counties were snatching up stacks of the papers from local newsstands and coin boxes.

Nearly 400,000 copies were sold before noon, said Bob Martin, circulation manager for the Herald Examiner. In some parts of Los Angeles, readers and vendors said, racks had been emptied as early as 7 a.m.

Martin said today’s newsstand sales total was the fourth-largest for a single day in the history of the paper. The coveted edition is expected to sell more than any other copy of the paper in the past 20 years.

“We’ve sold everything we’ve put out,” said Martin, whose paper announced Wednesday that it would publish its final edition Thursday. “People have been calling us all day looking for a paper. Our dealers and newsstands are calling us because they sold out as well. People expect this to be a collector’s item.”

Newsstand vendors said they were happily stunned by the skyrocketing sales of the final edition.

“We usually sell about 40 or 50 a day,” said Nirmal Singh, a vendor in Westwood. “We sold 200 today, but we could have used 500.”

Despite the sudden sales increase, Singh said, his business would suffer slightly in the long run from the closure of the Herald Examiner.

“It was a good paper and people would buy it,” he said. “We’re going to lose money. Of course, we’re going to stay in business, but it’ll still be a loss.”

Some readers were aggravated by the scarcity of the last edition.

“Where’s the Herald Examiner? Don’t you have the Herald Examiner? Doesn’t anybody have a Herald Examiner?” growled Robbie Hubbard at two vendors in front of a Wilshire Boulevard newsstand. “This is the second place I’ve gone, and nobody has a copy. I can’t believe this.”

While buyers like Hubbard scrambled to find just one copy, others hoarded and hawked stacks of the papers as fast--and for as much--as they could.

“Some kid on Fraternity Row flagged down the Herald truck when it got here this morning and bought six bundles” of 50 papers each, said Gary Pine, a sports information official at USC. “The last we heard, he’d sold three bundles--at $20 a copy.”

One veteran newspaper collector questioned whether the edition was worth such a price.

“People tend to collect papers for world events,” said Rick Brown, founder of the Newspaper Collectors Society of America. “Papers with headlines and stories about the (recent Bay Area) earthquake will be worth a lot. A newspaper’s folding may have an impact on the community, but it’s not a world event. The last edition probably won’t be worth much.”

But many readers said they cared little for profit margins. They said they planned to hold on to their copies in remembrance of the paper that was once America’s largest afternoon daily.

“I’m going to miss the Herald,” said Valerie Doby, 28, an accountant at Transamerica Insurance Co. “I’ve been downtown for 10 years and they have always been there for me. All we can do is keep (the employees of the daily) in our prayers.”