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).
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.They purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas in 1919 from their employer Appeal to Reason, a socialist weekly that Haldeman-Julius edited. They began printing these works on cheap pulp paper, stapled and bound with a blue or yellow paper cover that first sold for 5 cents apiece. 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.
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.
Some of the topics the Little Blue Books covered were on the cutting edge of societal norms. Along side 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 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.
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.
External links
- http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxhjulius.html
- http://library.indstate.edu/level1.dir/cml/rbsc/debs/bluebook.html
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