The Press: Little Blue Books

One winter’s day in Philadelphia 56 years ago, 15-year-old Emanuel Julius invested a dime in a paperback edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was, as it turned out, the wisest investment of his life. As Julius recalls in The World of Haldeman-Julius, an anthology of his writings published last week (Twayne Publishers of New York; 288 pp.; $4). Wilde’s poem did something to him. “Never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt hard as glass. I thought, at the moment, how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could be made available.”

In time it was not thousands but millions. During his lifetime. Emanuel Julius —or Haldeman-Julius, the hyphenation he assumed after marrying Anna Marcet Haldeman—sold more than 300 million copies of his Little Blue Books, mostly for a nickel apiece, in one of the most successful mail-order businesses ever conceived.

The Cerulean Stream. To many readers a generation ago, the publishing capital of the U.S. was the tiny southeast Kansas town of Girard (pop. 2,500), whence Haldeman-Julius’ Little Blue Books issued in a smudgy, cerulean stream that sometimes reached 65,000 a day. In newspaper ads from coast to coast he ran his enticing list of titles—eventually more than 2,000—and invited readers to clip the coupons. Among those who did were the late Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who took a supply to the South Pole, and a Texas oilman who bought 14 packages of 700 books each (total cost: $486.50) to ensure his grandchildren a rounded education.

These and millions of other readers were lured not only by the biggest little bargain in publishing—a Little Blue Book measured 3½ in. by 5 in., contained anywhere from 32 to 128 pages—but by a catalogue as racy as it was comprehensive. Haldeman-Julius gathered his titles largely from the public and the public domain, combining sex with the classics, self-improvement with sex—all mailed in plain wrappers. Over 40 years, Little Blue Book editions of 29 Shakespearean plays sold 5,500,000 copies—but one sex-instruction pamphlet alone, What Married Women Should Know* produced a total sale of 750,000.

When a book sold less than 10,000 copies a year, Haldeman-Julius often revived it by giving it a more provocative title. After Fleece of Gold, the Gautier story, was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, the market rose from 6,000 copies to 50,000 a year. Haldeman-Julius hired a stable of writers to grind out popular themes; by far the most prolific was an apostate priest in London, Joseph McCabe, who wrote on anything, and eventually produced more than 7,500,000 words at the rate of 10,000 a week.

Capitalist by Accident. The millionaire proprietor of this Midwest publishing empire never intended to be a capitalist. Son of an immigrant Russian-Jewish bookbinder, Emanuel Julius left school with a grammar school education, drifted around in the free-thinking Socialist currents of his time. He tried reporting for Socialist newspapers in Milwaukee and New York, in 1915 went out to Girard, Kans., to help resuscitate Appeal to Reason, a moribund Socialist periodical. After marrying Marcet Haldeman, a Girard banker’s daughter, he borrowed $250,000 from her to buy the paper.

Haldeman-Julius changed the name twice and personally pumped 70,000 words a month into the paper. Although he kept it limping along for years, Haldeman-Julius had long since fallen into prosperity as a publisher. One day in 1919, on a whim, he printed several thousand pamphlet copies of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, followed that up with Wilde’s Gaol. They were Nos. 1 and 2 of the Little Blue Books.

Success confused Haldeman-Julius as much as it gratified him. He built a swimming pool on the Girard farm, drank champagne—and went around in his stocking feet. A confirmed agnostic, he commissioned anti-Catholic tracts, but they only got him into trouble; a would-be author, he wrote several dozen Little Blue Books himself, but they were failures. He made millions; but when he died in 1951 —by drowning in his pool—he was out on bond under a six-month jail sentence for income tax evasion.

After his death, Blue Book sales dwindled. Of late they have shown signs of reviving in the hands of Henry J. Haldeman, 40, Haldeman-Julius’ son, who, after taking control in 1954, added new titles—Your Sex Life After 80, Rupture and Hernia, Eat and Get Skinny—with spicy illustrations on the covers. Such improvements boosted sales last year to some 2,000,000 copies at 10¢ each—a figure that, in Henry Haldeman’s view, barely scratches the surface. His father would have thought so too.

* Top seller in a popular category that included What Married Men Should Know, What Every Young Man Should Know, What Every Young Woman Should Know, What Every Girl Should Know, What Every Boy Should Know, What Women Past Forty Should Know.