Long before
Everything, long before the
internet there was the
Little Blue Books. Created by
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in 1919 these were small
low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the
working class as well as the β
educatedβ class. The idea 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. For a
nickel anyone could
purchase a
volume of the
collection of over 2,000 titles known as the
Little Blue Books
In just nine years the
idea caught on all around the
globe. The
Little Blue Books were finding their ways into the pockets of
laborers,
scholars and the average
citizen alike. The
St. Louis Dispatch called Julius βthe
Henry Ford of
literatureβ. Amongst the better known names of the day to support the
Little Blue Books were
Emperor Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia, Admiral
Richard Byrd, who took along a complete set to the
South Pole,
Franklin P. Adams of
Information Please and the thousands of average folks who purchased the
Little Blue Books through a
mail order system and latter in
book stores.
Because the
topics of the
Little Blue Books covered
political ideas and a wide scope of
religious views as well as
literature and
general knowledge, the
FBI viewed his
achievements as a
threat and landed him on their
enemies list. At the time of his
death in 1951
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius had done something that
transcended the
paranoia of the
establishment, for a
nickel he
offered everyone
access to a
world of
learning.
I have had the
opportunity to actually
hold a few of these. Its pretty
humbling if you let the scope
sweep over you. Here are these
discrete chunks of
knowing that were available for a
few cents. The size of the
books are such they could easily fit in a
shirt pocket. A worker could have a few tucked in their
shirt pocket ready for the
reading at any spare moment. It was more
accessible then the
net is now for most people. Until we get
affordable wireless PDAs with affordable access to something like
Project Gutenberg or
Everything we are still lacking the
scope and
penetration the
Little Blue Books had. This is not to
knock what we have done on the
net, its just to point out that we are
standing on the shoulders of giants and have
miles to go before we sleep.
A great
resource for
learning more about the
Little Blue Books is http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxhjulius.html