Little Blue Books

Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published from 1919 through 1978 by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas. They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of 300-500 million booklets sold over the series' lifetime.pg 265 of Susan Jacoby's ''Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism'', 2004, , . Published by Henry Holt and Company; cover design John Candell A Big Blue Book range was also published.

Origins

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and his wife, Marcet, set out to publish small low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the working class as well as the "educated" class. Their goal was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, common sense knowledge and various points of view out to as large an audience as possible. These books, at approximately 3½ by 5 inches (8.9 by 12.7 cm) easily fit into a working man's back pocket or shirt pocket. The inspiration for the series were cheap 10-cent paperback editions of various expired copyright classic works that Haldeman-Julius had purchased as a 15-year-old (the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol'' being especially enthralling). He wrote:

It was winter, and I was cold, but I sat down on a bench and read that booklet straight through, without a halt, and never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt as hard as glass. Never until then, or since, did any piece of printed matter move me more deeply...I'd been lifted out of this world - and by a 10¢ booklet. I thought, at the moment, how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could be made available.pg 28 of ''The World of Haldeman-Julius'', Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York; citation and quotation taken from Susan Jacoby's ''Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism'', 2004, , . Published by Henry Holt and Company; cover design John Candell

In 1919 they purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas from their employer '' Appeal to Reason'', a socialist weekly which had seen better days and that Haldeman-Julius edited. Though the ''Appeal to Reason'' was not the influential newspaper it had been, its printing presses (and more importantly the 175,000 names on its subscriber lists) would prove to be crucial. Before anything had even been printed, Haldeman-Julius asked ''Appeal to Reason'''s subscribers to send him an advance of $5; at 10 cents a pamphlet, he would then, at staggered intervals, send them 50 pamphlets which he would be able to print with the upfront money. Things went very well:

Five thousand readers took me up, which meant I had $25,000 to work with. I hurried through the 50 titles (and they were good ones, too, for I haven't believed in trash at any time in my life) and got many letters expressing satisfaction with the venture. Encouraged, I announced a second batch of 50 titles, and called for $5 subscriptions...Meanwhile, the booklets were selling well to readers who hadn't subscribed for batches of 50.pg 30 of ''The World of Haldeman-Julius'', Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York; citation and quotation taken from Susan Jacoby's ''Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism'', 2004, , . Published by Henry Holt and Company; cover design John Candell

In 1919 they began printing these works at a rate of 24,000 a day in a series called Appeal's Pocket Series on cheap pulp paper, stapled and bound with a red stiff paper cover for 25 cents. The name changed over the first few years (as did the color of the binding), at times known as the People's Pocket Series, the Appeal Pocket Series, the Ten Cent Pocket Series, the Five Cent Pocket Series, and finally the one that took, Little Blue Books in 1923. The price remained at 5-cents a copy for many years.

Popularity

In just nine years the idea caught on all around the globe as the Little Blue Books were finding their ways into the pockets of laborers, scholars, and the average citizen. The St. Louis Dispatch called Haldeman-Julius "the Henry Ford of literature". Among the better known names of the day to support the Little Blue Books were Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, W. E. B. Du Bois, Admiral Richard Byrd, who took along a set to the South Pole, and Franklin P. Adams of Information, Please!

Most were sold by mail order and promoted through sensationalistic advertisements (e.g. “At last! Books are cheaper than hamburgers!”) in newspapers and magazines such as ''Life'', ''Popular Science'', and '' Ladies’ Home Journal''. To save ad space, only the book titles were listed, organized by topic headings such as “Philosophy,” “How-To,” or “Sex.” Many classics were cut down to fit the publishing requirements, which Haldeman-Julius justified as "boring text", pioneering the concept later used by ''Reader's Digest''. A pioneer in guerrilla marketing, Haldeman-Julius sold his books not only in bookstores but everywhere he could reach the consumer, including drugstores, toy stores, even his own line of vending machines. Mail-order customers checked-off the titles they wanted and mailed in the order form, with $1 (20 books) being the minimum order. Many bookstores kept a book rack stocked with many Little Blue Book titles. Their small size and low price made them especially popular with travelers and transient working people.

If a book sold less than 10,000 copies in one year, Haldeman-Julius would remove it from his line, but usually only after trying a new title, often creating a hit. For instance, "The Tallow Ball" by Guy de Maupassant sold 15,000 copies one year, but 54,700 the next year after the title was changed to "A French Prostitute's Sacrifice".

Many famous people grew up on Little Blue Books. Louis L'Amour cites them as a major source of his own early reading in his autobiography ''Education of a Wandering Man''.See quotation here. Other writers who recall reading the series in their youth include Saul Bellow, Harlan Ellison, Jack Conroy, Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs and Studs Terkel.

The works covered were frequently classics of Western literature. Goethe and Shakespeare were well represented, as were the works of the Ancient Greeks, and more modern writers like Voltaire, Émile Zola, H. G. Wells

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases