Haldeman-Julius Publications

Haldeman-Julius Publications
Status	defunct
Founded	1919
Founder	E. Haldeman-Julius
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	Girard, Kansas

Haldeman-Julius Publications was an American book publisher founded by E. Haldeman-Julius in 1919, which operated through 1978. The firm sold hundreds of millions of copies of its low-cost books, giving its founder a reputation as "the Henry Ford of book publishing."

E. Haldeman-Julius

E. Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951). Courtesy Skepticism.org.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (July 30, 1889 – July 31, 1951) was a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist thinker, social reformer, and publisher.

Youth

Haldeman-Julius was born Emanuel Julius in Philadelphia, the son of a bookbinder. His parents were Jewish emigrants who had fled Russia and immigrated to America to escape religious persecution.

As a boy, Emanuel read voraciously. Because literature and pamphlets produced by the socialists were inexpensive, Julius read them and became convinced of their truth. He joined the Socialist Party before World War I.

Career

Haldeman-Julius rose to prominence as an editor (1915 - 1922), of "Appeal to Reason" a socialist newspaper with a large but declining national circulation. Along with his first wife, Marcet Haldeman (whose last name he adopted in hyphenate), after purchasing the "Appeal"'s printing operation in Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius began printing 3.5" x 5" pocket books on cheap pulp paper (similar to that used in pulp magazines), stapled in paper cover. They were originally called The Appeal's Pocket Series and sold in 1919 for 25 cents. The covers were either red or yellow.

Over the next several years Haldeman-Julius changed the name successively to The People's Pocket Series, Appeal Pocket Series, Ten Cent Pocket Series, Five Cent Pocket Series, Pocket Series and finally in 1923, Little Blue Books. The 5 cent price of the books remained in place for many years. There was also The Haldeman-Julius Monthly that published (at least) from January, 1927 - March, 1928 for 25 cents a copy. Many titles of classic literature were given lurid titles in order to increase sales. Eventually, millions of copies per year were sold in the late 1920s.

The couple had 2 children: Alice Haldeman-Julius Deloach (b. 1917 - d. 1991) and Henry Haldeman-Julius (b. 1919 d. 1990) (who later changed his name to Henry Julius Haldeman). They adopted Josephine Haldeman-Julius Roselle (b. 1910). Marcet and Emanuel legally separated in 1934. Marcet died in 1941, and a year later Haldeman-Julius married Susan Haney, an employee.

Death and legacy

In 1948 the FBI targeted and questioned Haldeman-Julius after his publication of The FBI - The Basis of an American police state;: the alarming methods of J. Edgar Hoover. In June 1951 Haldeman-Julius was found guilty of income tax evasion by a Federal grand jury and sentenced to 6 months in Federal prison and fined $12,500. The next month he drowned in his swimming pool.

The Little Blue Books

Poems on Evolution: An anthology by Langdon Smith and others. Girard, KS: Haldemand-Julius, 1924. Courtesy Open Library.

The Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published in 1919-1978 by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas. They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of 300-500 million booklets sold over the series' lifetime. A Big Blue Book range was also published.

Origins

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, an atheist-Jew, socialist, 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 3½ by 5 inches (8½ by 12¾ cm) easily fit into a working man's back pocket or shirt pocket. The inspiration for the series were cheap 10-cent paperback editions of various expired copyright classic works that Haldeman-Julius had purchased as a 15 year old (the Ballad of Reading Gaol being especially enthralling). He would later write:

“

It was winter, and I was cold, but I sat down on a bench and read that booklet straight through, without a halt, and never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt as hard as glass. Never until then, or since, did any piece of printed matter move me more deeply...I'd been lifted out of this world - and by a 10¢ booklet. I thought, at the moment, how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could be made available."

”

In 1919 they purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas from their employer Appeal to Reason, a socialist weekly which had seen better days and that Haldeman-Julius edited. Though the Appeal to Reason was not the influential newspaper it had been, its printing presses (and more importantly the 175,000 names on its subscriber lists) would prove to be crucial. Haldeman-Julius, before anything had even been printed, sent an appeal to the Appeal to Reason's subscribers to send him a prepayment of $5; at 10 cents a pamphlet, he would then send them at staggered intervals 50 pamphlets which he would be able to print with the advanced monies. Things went very well:

“

"Five thousand readers took me up, which meant I had $25,000 to work with. I hurried through the 50 titles (and they were good ones, too, for I haven't believed in trash at any time in my life) and got many letters expressing satisfaction with the venture. Encouraged, I announced a second batch of 50 titles, and called for $5 subscriptions...Meanwhile, the booklets were selling well to readers who hadn't subscribed for batches of 50."

”

In 1919 they began printing these works at a rate of 24,000 a day, in a series called Appeal's Pocket Series on cheap pulp paper, stapled and bound with a red stiff paper cover for 25 cents. The name changed over the first few years (as did the color of the binding), at times known as the People's Pocket Series, the Appeal Pocket Series, the Ten Cent Pocket Series, the Five Cent Pocket Series, and finally the one that took, Little Blue Books in 1923. The price remained at 5-cents a copy for many years.

Popularity

In just 9 years the idea caught on all around the globe as the Little Blue Books were finding their ways into the pockets of laborers, scholars, and the average citizen. The St. Louis Dispatch called Haldeman-Julius "the Henry Ford of literature". Among the better known names of the day to support the Little Blue Books were Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, W. E. B. Du Bois, Admiral Richard Byrd, who took along a set to the South Pole, and Franklin P. Adams of Information, Please!

Most were sold by mail order and promoted through sensationalistic advertisements (e.g. “At last! Books are cheaper than hamburgers!”) in newspapers and magazines such as Life, Popular Science, and Ladies’ Home Journal. To save ad space, only the book titles were listed, organized by topic headings such as “Philosophy,” “How-To,” or “Sex.” Many classics were cut-down to fit the publishing requirements, which Haldeman-Julius justified as "boring text", pioneering the concept later used by Reader's Digest. A pioneer in guerrilla marketing, Haldeman-Julius sold his books not only in bookstores but everywhere he could reach the consumer, including drugstores, toy stores, even his own line of vending machines. Mail-order customers checked-off the titles they wanted and mailed in the order form, with $1 (20 books) being the minimum order. Many bookstores kept a book rack stocked with many Little Blue Book titles. Their small size and low price made them especially popular with travelers and transient working people.

If a book sold less than 10,000 copies in a year, Haldeman-Julius would remove it from his line, but usually only after trying a new title, often creating a hit. For instance, The Tallow Ball by Guy de Maupassant sold 15,000 copies one year, but 54,700 the next year after the title was changed to A French Prostitute's Sacrifice".

Many famous people grew up on Little Blue Books. Louis L'Amour cites them 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.

The works covered were frequently classics of Western literature. Goethe and Shakespeare were well represented, as were the works of the Ancient Greeks, and more modern writers like Voltaire, Émile Zola, H. G. Wells. Some of the topics the Little Blue Books covered were on the cutting edge of societal norms. Alongside 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 anti-religious tracts written by Robert Ingersoll, ex-Catholic priest Joseph McCabe, and 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

Demand for existing titles remained steady throughout the Depression although only about 300 new titles would be released during the 1930s, the bulk appearing prior to 1932.[1] 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, getting him convicted of income tax evasion. This persecution 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.

Later years

By the time of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's death on July 31, 1951, the series would support 1,873 active titles.[2]

His son Henry took over his father's publishing efforts

In the 1950s the San Diego, California-based atheist-Freethinker publication The Truth Seeker bought out most of their supply and raised prices.

The works continued to be reprinted until the Girard printing plant and warehouse were destroyed by fire on July 4, 1978, with 1914 total titles published.

Selected publications

• The Militant Agnostic. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. (Orig. pub. 1926.)
• My First Twenty-Five Years. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949.
• My Second Twenty-Five Years. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949.
• The World of Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, 1960, published in New York

See also

• List of American book publishers

References

• Burnett, Betty. "Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel." American National Biography. Ed. John A. Garraty, Mark C. Carnes. 24 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Tim Davenport, "The Appeal to Reason: Forerunner of Haldeman-Julius Publications", Big Blue Newsletter No. 3 (2004). Retrieved November 16, 2009.
• Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, The World of Haldeman-Julius (compiled by Albert Mordell). New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960.
• Rolf Potts, "The Henry Ford Of Literature", The Believer, September, 2008.

Archives

Several complete collections of Haldeman-Julius Publications are known to exist including one at Pittsburg State University's Leonard H. Axe Library.

E. Haldeman-Julius' papers are held at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, a few miles down the road from Girard in the southeastern corner of the state.

External links

• Works by Haldeman-Julius Publications at Project Gutenberg
• More on Haldeman-Julius from the Axe Library
• Haldeman-Julius Family Tree on haldeman-julius.org
• Rolf Potts, "The Henry Ford of Literature," The Believer, September 2008.
• E. Haldeman-Julius Collection at Leonard Axe Library
• Little Blue Book collection at Indiana State Library
• Little Blue Book collection at San Diego State University
• Discussion group for Little Blue Books collectors
• Little Blue Book Collection: Archival set of Little Blue Books, (853 titles). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
• Haldeman-Julius: Pocket Series and the Little Blue Books Official website
• Little Blue Books searchable database