He is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions of copies.

Literature and pamphlets produced by the socialists were inexpensive; Julius read them and was convinced by their arguments.

[3] As he put it in 1913, "Only four years ago, I was a factory hand — slaving away in a textile mill in Philadelphia.

He and his first wife, Marcet Haldeman (whose last name he adopted in hyphenate[8]), purchased the Appeal's printing operation in Girard, Kansas and began printing 3.5 in × 5 in (89 mm × 127 mm) pocket books on cheap pulp paper (similar to that used in pulp magazines), stapled in paper cover.

In 1924 they launched The Haldeman-Julius Monthly[11] (later renamed The Debunker), which had a greater emphasis on Freethought, and in 1932 added The Militant Atheist, among other journals.

The novelist Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) described the Haldeman-Julius publications in his autobiography and their potential influence: Riding a freight train out of El Paso, I had my first contact with the Little Blue Books.

Published in Girard, Kansas, by Haldeman-Julius, they were slightly larger than a playing card and had sky-blue paper covers with heavy black print titles.

Among the books available were the plays of Shakespeare, collections of short stories by De Maupassant, Poe, Jack London,[12] Gogol, Gorky, Kipling, Gautier, Henry James, and Balzac.

[7] His son Henry took over his father's publishing efforts, and the books continued to be sold until the printing house burned down on July 4, 1978.