Little Blue Books

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Little Blue Books

Little Blue Books—compact, cheap, often carrying alluring titles or topics—became immensely successful in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Because they cost only a nickel apiece, the books represented the true reading taste of Americans, according to their publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), who referred to the thousands of titles he published in a small town in southeastern Kansas as "a university in print" and a "democracy of literature." Many of his best-selling books promised frank discussions of sex for an American public that was still deemed bashful about the question. But the chapbooks also gave thrifty readers a broad range of literature at practically no cost: ancient and modern works, essays, fiction, philosophy, humor, biography, self-improvement manuals, and a variety of other works.

Haldeman-Julius, son of a Russian Jewish immigrant bookbinder in Philadelphia, worked at Socialist newspapers in New York and elsewhere before marrying Anna Marcet Haldeman in 1916. Daughter of a prominent banking family in Girard, Kansas (population 2,500), and a niece of the prominent social worker Jane Addams, she supplied him with half of his last name and funds for his purchase of a financially struggling Socialist newspaper called the Appeal to Reason, which he eventually was forced to close although he continued with other journalistic efforts.

Haldeman-Julius said he first thought of printing cheap books for the masses after reading a copy of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol when he was 15. In 1919, he introduced his concept with 25-cent paperbacks, beginning with Reading Gaol and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Variously called Pocket Classics, People's Classics, and Pocket Series, they sported covers of different colors. Two years later the publisher spurred sales by cutting the price to a nickel apiece, adopting blue covers (although some later came with covers in yellow and other colors), and naming the series Little Blue Books. Cheaply bound and printed on inexpensive newsprint, the books measured three-and-one-half by five inches and usually contained 64 pages, though they could run from 32 to 128 pages. Haldeman-Julius advertised them widely in newspapers and magazines at 20 for a dollar postpaid and they became enormously popular. By 1927 he reported he had sold 21 million and it has been estimated that he sold more than 300 million in his lifetime. The publisher boasted he could provide the information and entertainment found in hardcover books at one-hundredth the price.

Although books with sexy titles or topics became Haldeman-Julius's most popular category, strict laws prohibited distribution of material relating to sexual subjects through the mails, and the texts, some by authors like Margaret Sanger, an early public advocate of birth control, were not as saucy as some readers perhaps hoped. "Sex hygiene" manuals employed euphemistic titles to avoid embarrassment to customers, Haldeman-Julius said. What Every Young Woman Should Know, What Every Young Man Should Know, and How to Be Happy Though Married were several top sellers.

Though he could be coy about titling the sex manuals he published, Haldeman-Julius did not hesitate to spice up titles of slow-moving books. Sales of Theophile Gautier's novel Fleece of Gold jumped from 6,000 copies in 1925 to 50,000 the next year when Haldeman-Julius retitled it The Quest for a Blonde Mistress. Sales of a book about Henry II rocketed from 5,000 to 300,000 after Haldeman-Julius renamed it The Story of a Lustful King.

The entire series catered to Americans' quest for self-improvement and self-education. Although Haldeman-Julius boasted that his reprints included "all the famous authors from Aesop to Zarilla," he also hired freelancers to write original books, including his perennially popular line of self-help chapbooks that promised to make readers smarter, stronger, more attractive, and better in practically every way. His most productive writer, a former priest in London, pumped out 10,000 words a week and 7.5 million words in all. The publisher also picked liberally from older works with expired copyrights. He estimated in 1928 that one-quarter of his books fell in the latter category. Authors of the 2,000 titles on his list included Edgar Allan Poe, Clarence Darrow, Will Durant, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, and William Shakespeare, among many others. Books extolling socialism were common.

Besides editing the Little Blue Books, Haldeman-Julius wrote many himself, including fiction and essays. One of his favorite themes was atheism (The Church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life ; Is Theism a Logical Philosophy? ; The Meaning of Atheism ; Studies in Rationalism), although he also offered his customers versions of the Bible and other religious material. He claimed he wanted only to provide readers a range of subjects and philosophies and to let them draw their own conclusions. He wrote a number of books with his wife, who also wrote some by herself, including What the Editor's Wife Is Thinking About, which jumped from annual sales of 1,000 to 16,000 when it was retitled Marcet Haldeman-Julius' Intimate Notes on Her Husband in 1927.

Cheap and portable, the books remained popular even during the Great Depression, but their popularity began to decline after World War II as greater prosperity made the books less appealing. Haldeman-Julius carried on the business until he died in his swimming pool on his ranch outside Girard in 1951, shortly after being sentenced to six months in prison and a $12,500 fine for income tax evasion. (The death was ruled an accidental drowning). His son, Henry J. Haldeman, continued to publish the books until the mid-1970s, tempting readers with titles like Your Sex Life After 80, Pin-Ups of Now Magazette, and Rupture and Hernia, but they never regained the popularity of their early years.

—Daniel Lindley