Little Blue Books
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Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas (1919-1978). They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of more than 300 million booklets sold over the series's lifetime. [1]
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[edit] Origins
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a socialist reformer and newspaper publisher, 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 3 1/2 by 5 inches (8 1/2 by 12 3/4 cm) easily fit into a working man's back pocket or shirt pocket. The inspiration for the series were cheap ten cent paperback editions of various classic works that Haldeman-Julius had purchased as a 15 year old (the Ballad of Reading Gaol being especially enthralling). He would later write:
| “ | 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 10C booklet. I thought, at the moment, how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could be made available." | ” |
They purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas in 1919 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. Haldeman-Julius, before anything had even been printed, sent an appeal to the Appeal to Reason's subscribers to send him a prepayment of $5; at 10 cents a pamphlet, he would then send them at staggered intervals 50 pamphlets which he would be able to print with the advanced monies. 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." | ” |
They began printing these works (at a rate of 240,00 a day[1]) on cheap pulp paper, stapled and bound with a blue or yellow paper cover that first sold for 25 cents apiece but quickly were dropped to only 5 cents. The name changed over the first few years, at times known as the People's Pocket Series, the Appeal Pocket Series, the Ten Cent Pocket Series and the one that took, Little Blue Books.
[edit] Popularity
In just nine years the idea caught on all around the globe. The Little Blue Books were finding their ways into the pockets of laborers, scholars and the average citizen alike. The St. Louis Dispatch called Haldeman-Julius "the Henry Ford of literature". Amongst the better known names of the day to support the Little Blue Books were Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Admiral Richard Byrd, who took along a set to the South Pole, and Franklin P. Adams of Information, Please!
Many bookstores kept a book rack stocked with many Little Blue Book titles, and their small size and low price made them especially popular with travelers and transient working people. Louis L'Amour cites the Little Blue Books as a major source of his own early reading in his autobiography, Education of a Wandering Man. Other writers who recall reading the series in their youth include Saul Bellow, Harlan Ellison, Jack Conroy, Ralph Ellison, 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, Emile Zola, H. G. Wells. Some of the topics the Little Blue Books covered were on the cutting edge of societal norms. Alongside books on making candy (#518 - "How to Make All Kinds of Candy" by Helene Paquin) and classic literature (#246 - Hamlet by William Shakespeare) were ones exploring homosexuality (#692 - "Homo-Sexual Life" by William J Fielding) and agnostic viewpoints (#1500 - "Why I Am an Agnostic: Including Expressions of Faith from a Protestant a Catholic and a Jew" by Clarence Darrow). Shorter works from many popular authors such as Jack London and Henry David Thoreau were published, as were a number of political tracts written by Robert Ingersoll or Haldeman-Julius himself. A young Will Durant wrote a series of Blue Books on philosophy which were republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as The Story of Philosophy, a popular work that remains in print today.
[edit] Decline in popularity
Following World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Little Blue Books' inclusion of such subjects as socialism, atheism, and frank treatment of sexuality as a threat and put Haldeman-Julius on their enemies list. This caused a rapid decline in the number of bookstores carrying the Little Blue Books, and they slowly sank into obscurity by the 1950s, although still well remembered by older people who had read them in the 1920s and 1930s.
The works continued to be reprinted after Haldeman-Julius' drowning in 1951 and were sold by mail order by his son until the Girard printing plant and warehouse was destroyed by fire in 1978.
Several complete collections are known to exist including one at Pittsburg State University's Leonard H Axe Library.
[edit] Further reading
- The World of Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York
[edit] References
- ^ a b pg 265 of Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: a history of American secularism, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7776-6, ISBN 0-8050-7776-6. Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC; cover design John Candell
- ^ pg 28 of The World of Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York; citation and quote taken from Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: a history of American secularism, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7776-6, ISBN 0-8050-7776-6. Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC; cover design John Candell
- ^ pg 30 of The World of Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York; citation and quote taken from Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: a history of American secularism, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7776-6, ISBN 0-8050-7776-6. Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC; cover design John Candell
