Little Blue Book

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.

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 wrote: 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.

In just nine 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.

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.

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 same-sex love (#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.

[7] 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.