What Everyman Should Know: Emanuel Julius’s Radical Little Blue Books Pocket-Series

By Dylan Wheeler

In 1905, fifteen year-old Emanuel Julius was browsing through available titles in

Nicholas L. Brown’s bookshop located on Fifth and Pine Street in his hometown of

Philadelphia. A used pamphlet edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol

caught Emanuel’s eye, and he purchased the poem for only a dime. Ignoring the cold of

that winter afternoon, he crossed the street towards a nearby park, and sat under a tree as

he read Wilde’s ballad cover-to-cover. By the time he finished, the cold had turned

Emanuel’s hands blue, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was somewhere else entirely.

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That ten-cent booklet stirred something within him that would determine the path of his

life. How wonderful would it be if thousand of such booklets were available? It is the

memory of that evening spent reading that inspired Emanuel to create the Little Blue

Books pocket-series.

  The  series   is  comprised  of   thousands  of   titles,  each  printed   in  a  small   three  

and  a  half  by   five-­‐inch  staple-­‐bound  booklet.  At   just   twenty-­‐five  cents  per  booklet,  

these  tracts  were  the  first  form  of  affordable  “paperback”  literature  for  many  in  the  

working   class.   Even   the   poorest   Americans   could   now   obtain   extensive   personal  

literary  and  philosophical   collections  ordered   simply   through  a  mail-­‐in   subscriber  

list.  Thousands  of  works,  both  classical  and  contemporary,  were  compressed  into  a  

small  text  block  of  roughly  sixty-­‐four  pages.  In  fact,  the  booklets  gained  worldwide  

popularity   for   their   affordable   price   and   transportable   nature.   How   Emanuel  

Haldeman-­‐Julius  came  to  achieve  this  feat  leads  to  a  story  of  a  young  revolutionary  

dedicated  to  bettering  his  fellow  man.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Emanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia, in

1889. He was the son of Russian-Jewish Parents who

had immigrated to America just two years prior. His

father, David Julius, worked as a bookbinder. 1 This

bookish profession created in Emanuel a fascination

for books from a very young age. However, his

family did not have much money, and it was difficult

for Emanuel to find books that he could afford. In

later recollections about his childhood, Emanuel

reflected, “seeing a book I could not afford to buy

was worse than being hungry and looking at a bun in

the bakery window.”

Emanuel was often harassed on account of his Jewish background, to the point

that he decided to leave his religious faith behind altogether. Instead, he adopted a new

belief, a faith in man. Socialism was rapidly expanding in the early twentieth century.

Between 1902 and 1912, over three hundred socialist newspapers spread across America

and published a wide variety of affordable literature. The pragmatism and focus on

everyday people of socialist print enticed Emanuel. Indeed, the movement’s convictions

soon became his own. Although his formal education ended at the age of thirteen,

Emanuel became an avid reader, and his passion for books and knowledge inspired him

to take up writing. His first article as a teenager, titled “Mark Twain—Radical,” was sold

to the International Socialist Review and earned Emanuel ten dollars.

                                                                                                               1  His  father’s  name  prior  to  his  americanization  was  David  Zolajefsky.    

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This success would lead Emanuel to obtain a job as copyreader at the socialist

newspaper Philadelphia Daily. There his talent for writing provided correspondent

positions with several other socialist papers, including: The Milwaukee Leader, Chicago

Daily World, Los Angeles Citizen, and the New York Call. In 1915, Emanuel’s reputation

as an effective writer landed him also a position at the Appeal of Reason, the Girard, in

Kansas, based socialist newspaper.

Appeal of Reason was one of America’s most popular socialist newspapers, with

nearly 700,000 subscribers by 1912. Founded by J.A. Wayland in 1895, the newspaper’s

name was inspired by the works of the English born, revolutionary Thomas Paine, whose

radical and elegance eloquence spurred the American Revolution with influential

publications such as Common Sense. Although Girard was largely a conservative town,

where people at first frowned upon what they perceived as the advent of a “wild eyed

fanatic” in J.A. Wayland. Such apprehensions were quickly laid to rest the moment the

newspaper became the largest employer of the town and important source of economic

success.

However, when Emanuel Julius came to Appeal of Reason in 1915, the newspaper

had begun to experience a sharp decline in popularity. Just three years prior, J.A.

Wayland, the editor of Appeal of Reason, had committed suicide. Inside a book sitting on

the bedside table next to where Wayland had shot himself, he wrote the epitaph: “The

struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort; let it pass.” Wayland’s

initial enthusiasm for the socialist cause had diminished in the face of an increasingly

unsympathetic public. Indeed, just year prior the Social Democratic party itself had been

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split in two over the fundamental debate of whether or not America should enter the

Great War in Europe.2

Living in Girard, Kansas, Emanuel Julius met Marcet Haldeman, an aspiring stage

actress who belonged to one of the town’s most affluent families. Marcet, a fiercely

independent, well educated, and outspoken feminist, might have seemed intimidating to

most men. However, Emanuel quickly fell in love and married after only a six-month

courtship on June 1st, 1916. As a demonstration of their commitment to gender equality

and mutual respect, Emanuel and Marcet combined their surnames, which changes

Julius’s name into Emanuel Haldeman-Julius.

As the two newlyweds settled into married life, Appeal of Reason experienced a

severe loss of subscribers as a response to larger changing political attitudes in America

following the end of World War I.3 Julius saw the need to make drastic changes to the

failing newspaper. With the help of his wife and her substantial inheritance, he purchased

a controlling interest of Appeal of Reason in January of 1919.

Julius had learned from Marion Wharton, the head of the English department at

the People’s College of Fort Scott, just thirty miles north of Girard, that cheap literature

for college students was unavailable. In homage to the cheap booklet that Julius had

devoured in his youth, he started printing thousands of copies of Oscar Wilde’s The

Ballad of Reading Gaol to test the waters of the literary marketplace. He found out that

                                                                                                               2  The   Sedition   and   Espionage   Acts   passed   by   Congress   towards   the   end   of  World  War  I  and  targeted  dissent  towards  the  government’s  war  efforts.  As  a  result,  many  members   left   the  socialist  movement  out  of   fear  of  being  associated  with   the  anti-­‐war  rhetoric.  3  The paper had flipped its stance on American militarism to protect itself from the government’s wrath, and loyal subscribers saw this change as a clear sign that the editors were not fully committed to the ideals of socialism.  

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when he sold these copies alongside the Appeal’s standard publication for only twenty-

five cents, that these cheap Wild booklets were an instant success.

Emanuel soon conceived the idea of publishing a fifty-book series of classical

works, dubbed “The Appeal’s pocket-series.” The literary series, which only cost five

dollars, received over five thousand orders in just the first week. Emboldened by this

instant success, Emanuel set out to start an ambitious literary revolution orchestrated

from Girard, Kansas.

In November of 1921, Emanuel announced the publication of a new series of

booklets, called “The Little Blue Books pocket-series.” The pocket-sized books were

extremely simply in design. They were stapled instead of sown together, for example, and

bound in cheap heavy-grade paper, in the period such rough paper was typically colored

blue. Each Blue Book contained an average of sixty-four pages, made out of just thirty-

two full leafs stapled together and composing the entire Little Blue Book text block. Due

to the pragmatic nature of the booklets, they contained no embellishments or illustrations.

They were, instead, designed to cramp as much text as possible onto each page. In fact,

the average Little Blue Book holds roughly 200 to 250 words per page in a simple Times-

New-Roman-styled font. Originally, a Little Blue Book sold for a quarter, but after

gaining widespread popularity, Julius could further decreased the price for his books to a

dime, and eventually to even just a nickel.

The Little Blue Books series was dedicated to spreading a diverse range of both

classical literature and contemporary and philosophical ideas. I also gained a reputation

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for controversial topics. For instance, two extraordinary Little Blue Book pocket versions

were: What Every Married Woman Should Know and What Every Married Man Should

Know. Both titles were guides for sexual health and recreation, instructing readers on

how to improve their sex-lives and achieve satisfaction with their partners. In post-war

America, such topics were still a taboo to speak about in public discourse. Readers

enjoyed the anonymity of ordering these titles through the company’s discreet

subscription service. The series, however, also delved into much more than just a

liberating sexual revolution. Indeed, from How the Great Corporations Rule the United

States to How to Make All Kinds of Candy. Julius made a point to include all aspects of

radical human knowledge.

Of course, Julius’s Little Blue Book booklets were never meant to adorn the

shelves of a home library as a symbol of affluence or education like some exotic peacock

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feathers. Instead, their focus was to be read and easily stored in a pocket during a busy

workday. The Little Blue Books were intended to be transported and shared, easily

accessible to everybody who desired knowledge or mere information. They were made in

an effort to take the opportunities afforded by education from the hands of a cultural elite

and transfer it, instead, to those with a passion for learning and self-improvement. As a

small inscription inside the Little Blue Book edition of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”

states, these books were dedicated “To the Working Men of America.”

The eccentric Julius believed it was important to present to readers a vast range of

ideas to provoke conversation and individual betterment. The best way to empower the

working class of America, in fact Julius held, was to cheaply offer the tools for self-

education. This ultimately is the philosophy of the Little Blue Books series: the

improvement of man through reading, achieved through individual choice and effort.

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Works  Cited  

Davenport,  Tim.  “The  Appeal  to  Reason:  Forerunner  of  Haldeman-­‐Julius    

Publications.”    Big  Blue  Newsletter,  3rd  edition,  2004.    

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/hjcc/2004/0800-­‐hjcc-­‐  

bbn03.pdf  

“Marcet  and  Emanuel  Haldeman-­‐Julius.”  Kansas  Historical  Society,  Dec.  2004,    

http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/marcet-­‐and-­‐emanuel-­‐haldeman-­‐

julius/12077    

Potts,  Rolf.  “The  Henry  Ford  of  Literature.”  Believer,  Sept.  2008,    

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200809/?read=article_potts  

Shocket,  Eric.  “Proletarian  Paperbacks:  The  Little  Blue  Books  and  Working-­‐Class    

Culture.”  College  Literature,  vol.  29.  no.  4,  2002,  pp.  67-­‐77.