Little Blue Books

LITTLE BLUE BOOKS. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889–1951) began publication of the Little Blue Books in Girard, Kansas, soon after purchasing an interest in the Appeal to Reason in 1919. Responding to a request for inexpensive textbooks from Marian Wharton, head of the English Department of the Socialist People’s College in nearby Fort Scott, Haldeman-Julius prepared a set of fifty paperbound booklets, three and a half by five inches in size, consisting of the Appeal Pocket Series and the People’s Pocket Series. This collection of literary classics and socialist tracts was advertised in the Appeal at five dollars per set.

Response from subscribers was immediate and significant. Mass-production techniques had to be utilized to meet mail-order demands. As more sold, prices were lowered and series titles changed to reflect the newer prices (the Ten Cent Pocket Series, etc.). In 1923 the series became the Little Blue Books and expanded into a “University in Print,” with original writings substituted for most of the reprint titles. (Shakespeare and Ingersoll were among those authors kept in print even if they did not meet the annual quota of ten thousand sales per title.) Although translations of the Greek and Roman plays (as well as other cultural titles) gave way to better-selling joke books and how-to manuals, the political integrity of the series was maintained by original contributions from W. E. B. Du Bois, Bertrand Russell, Kate Richards O’Hare, Upton Sinclair, Anna Louise Strong, Clarence Darrow, and others. Many young Left writers, such as James T. Farrell, saw their first publications under the Haldeman-Julius imprint. Haldeman-Julius published 2,203 titles in the various series. Nothing was too controversial for him to make available: from Margaret Sanger on birth control (1919) through numerous debunkers of religion and politics (strongest in the 1930s) to critics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1948).

Cothran, Andrew. “The Little Blue Book Man and the Big American Parade.” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1966.

Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel. The First Hundred Million. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928.

Johnson, Richard Colles, and G. Thomas Tanselle. “The Haldeman-Julius ‘Little Blue Books’ as a Bibliographical Problem.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 64 (1970).

Little Blue Book Collection: Archival set of Little Blue Books, (853 titles). From the Rare Book and Special Collection Division at the Library of Congress.

E. Haldeman-Julius Collection, Leonard Axe Library. https://web.archive.org/web/20150901090722/http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxhjulius.html