Little Blue Books
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Little Blue Books are a collection of works published by the Little Blue Book Publishing Company (1919-1978). 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.
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.
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 .
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) . The FBI viewed this as a threat and put Haldeman-Julius on their enemies list.
The works continued to be reprinted after Haldeman-Julius' drowning in 1951 and only ended with the burning down of the Girard printing plant in 1978.
Several complete collections are known to exist including one at Pittsburg State University's Leonard H Axe Library.