Little Blue Books and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius

I just received a neat email from Jason, one of our blog readers, about his website where he discusses the Little Blue Books series which was published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and his son Henry J. Haldeman. Its quite a good page and provides a lot of neat information.

Haldeman was a newspaper man who wished to publish small low priced paperback books for the working class.  The books were to be cheap and small enough to fit into ones pocket (~3.5"x5").  In 1919 he purchased Appeal to Reason publishing and raised his start up capital by by appealing to the companies 175, 000 person subscriber list  asking them to pledge $5 each to receive 50 future publications.  5000 of the readers took him up on the offer and he was in business.

Over the course of the companies existence (1919-1978) the Halderman's printed thousands of editions amounting to hundreds of millions of copies.  The Little Blue Books was just one of several different series the Haldemans produced, others included: The Appeal's Pocket Series, People's Pocket Series, Appeal Pocket Series, Ten Cent Pocket Series, Five Cent Pocket Series and the Pocket Series.

I find this type of publication fascinating.  They became desirable because they were cheaply produced and therefore were well within the price range of the working class.  Because they were cheap they were used, abused, and discarded which is what has made them collectible. This same phenomenon occurred with Victorian era Yellow Backs as well as the 1920s-50s pulp paperbacks... I'm sure there are more these are just the first two that came to my head.

                                                            

                                Yellow-backs                                 Little Blue Books                               Pulp Novels

This is also a great type of book for a beginner collector because even with moderate means one can begin to put together a very nice collection without spending a mint (although it is still easy to get carried away). 

If you want a more in depth review on Halderman and Little Blue Books I recommend Jason's website, it has lots of really good information, or search for Little Blue Books on BookFinder.com 

[Now reading: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga]

Comments

[Rj]

These are quite interesting collectibles, not only for the reasons mentioned in this article but because many of the publications are enjoyable to actually READ! I've also been finding considerable information beneficial to the Little Blue Book collector at:

http://www.little-blue-books.com