The First 300 Million

Few publishers have been as prolific as E. (for Emanuel) Haldeman-Julius. In 30 years he has sold more than 300 million of his world-famed Little Blue Books, whose 2,000 volumes range from the Bible, Shakespeare and Aristotle to socialism, psychoanalysis and sex. Haldeman-Julius, an agnostic, has infuriated clergymen and delighted village atheists, but he has probably helped to open as many curious minds as he has helped to frazzle unstable ones. Last week, in the biggest sale of his career, he slashed his famed Little Blue Books from 10-c- to 6-c-, in an attempt to unload his ten-million-volume inventory.

Hard pressed by the book slump, Haldeman-Julius had decided to junk his familiar, plain format in favor of a new look. From his printing house in Girard, Kans. (pop. 2,500), he will continue to fill mail orders for everything from Practical Masonry (No. 1,232) to Margaret Sanger's What Every Girl Should Know (No. 14). But from now on, the Blue Books will be dressed up in lively, illustrated jackets in every color except blue.

Kings & Commoners. The idea of bringing cheap books to the multitudes first struck Haldeman-Julius when he was 15, after he had breathlessly devoured a cheap copy of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol. Maybe, he thought, if books were cheap enough, more people would read them. Fifteen years later, when he became the publisher of a weekly Socialist newspaper in Girard, Haldeman-Julius decided to try the idea. He pulled out the battered old Ballad and a companion copy of the Rubaiyat, handed them to his perplexed linotype operator to set in type.

To his first advertisement in 1919, in his own New Appeal, Haldeman-Julius got 5,000 replies. When he took a $150 flyer in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he got back $1,000 in orders. Later, misplacing the copy for another ad, he dashed off an eye-catching substitute: WOULD YOU SPEND $2.98 FOR A COLLEGE EDUCATION? Thousands of customers answered yes.

Haile Selassie wrote from Addis Ababa for a supply of Little Blue Books; Admiral Byrd took along a complete set to the South Pole; Franklin P. (Information Please) Adams is a steady customer. For kings and commoners, Haldeman-Julius has one inflexible rule: cash in advance. He grosses around $500,000 a year, but the profit on the average Blue Book is a bare two-tenths of 1-c-. Even so, Haldeman-Julius, though still a talking Socialist, can indulge a taste for champagne and crepes suzette, keep up a 160-acre farm.

What's in a Name? Since Oscar Wilde and Omar Khayyam went to work for him, Haldeman-Julius has also taken on Plato, Dante, Tolstoy, Goethe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Tom Paine. But the big names are rarely the biggest drawing cards. De Maupassant's Tallow Ball sold only a poky 15,000 copies a year until Haldeman-Julius re-christened it A Prostitute's Sacrifice (it jumped to about 55,000 a year).* The bestselling Blue Books are those on sex, psychoanalysis and self-improvement; Haldeman-Julius has them written to order by eight staffers scattered around the world. One of these, William J. Fielding, who works for Manhattan's swank Tiffany jewelers, wrote the alltime bestseller: What Married Women Should Know (493,000 copies).

* In his new format, Haldeman-Julius tried the same boob-catcher with another De Maupassant classic, Room No. 11, the story of a two-timing wife. His new title: What Happened in Room No. 11?

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