The Lessons of Little Golden Books
I’ve been on a Little Golden Books kick lately. For professional reasons, of course. And perhaps a healthy dollop of nostalgia.
These hardy picture books are still being pumped out by the millions, entertaining ever-new generations of children. Like Disney, Fisher-Price and Lego, the Little Golden Books name has become a solid “brand” that families can depend upon. Given their ubiquitous presence, however, it’s easy to forget just how totally unique they were when first introduced back in the 1940s. Although Apple became an icon on the phrase “Think Different,” Little Golden Books has every right to claim it, too.
To understand the impact of Little Golden Books’ arrival, it helps to know what was going on in the kiddie book world of the early 1940s. A child of that era had many different options for reading: the range of characters and topics had expanded since the turn of the 20th century, when most child-oriented books focused on bland, sanctimonious lesson-teaching. Proto-Young Adult stars Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys came onto the scene, while Big Little Books had translated everyone from Mickey Mouse to Buck Rogers from one medium to another. Despite the abundant variety, however, most books for kids were published and marketed exactly like the grown-up stuff. They were only sold in fancy book stores and priced accordingly (making the product more of a special-occasion item, reserved for holidays and birthdays). Also, most children’s books of that period were printed using the same methodology as adult books, with dust jackets and flimsy pages which didn’t hold up to the rigors of youngsters’ hands.
A man named George Duplaix saw the potential for something different—sturdy, attractive picture-based books for children, available at an affordable price, and in retailers outside the standard urban bookshop. The Little Golden Books line debuted with twelve initial titles in 1942, priced at an astonishing 25 cents apiece. Although originally intended to be sold at double the price, publishers Simon & Shuster found that they could lower the cost by publishing 50,000 copies of each title, instead of 25,000—thus, avoiding the L.G.B. line having to compete against other 50-cent books.
Despite their modest price, Little Golden Books had the patina of high quality. They came with a standard size (6.25 by 8.25 inches), page length (44 pages), and distinctive binding printed with a leafy brown and yellow pattern (the iconic metallic gold didn’t come in until later). The series editors made sure to get well-respected authors and illustrators on the books, such as Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight, Moon) and Gustaf Tenggren (who had previously worked for Walt Disney as a concept artist). Even if this ambitious project turned into a failure, at least it likely would have been a noble one.
But it didn’t fail—on the contrary, Little Golden Books were a smash success right from the start (many customers bought the entire 12-book series at once—an instant library for three bucks). Looking back, the most audacious thing they did was to stock the books in drug stores, and (later on) supermarkets. Realistically, it doesn’t make sense to buy a book at either of those types of places, yet Duplaix and the Little Golden Books people obviously saw potential in them. As it turned out, that potential was huge in places where over-stimulated kids and harried moms congregate.
After World War II ended and the Baby Boom exploded, Little Golden Books took off like a rocket. By 1954, half of Little Golden Books’ large library of titles had sold a million copies apiece. They were read and loved in every country on Earth, except the Soviet Union (who derided the classic The Poky Little Puppy as capitalist propaganda). The nursery stories and fairy tales of earlier books had expanded to include volumes starring Disney characters and then-popular kiddie properties like Howdy Doody, Lassie and Captain Kangaroo. 1951’s Doctor Dan, the Bandage Man was another milestone, a book packaged with Band-Aids which children could play “doctor” with. A similar venture, Little Lulu and Her Magic Tricks (1954), came with a mini package of Kleenex tissues. Synergy, baby.
Little Golden Books’ low cost and easy accessibility played a huge part in their success, although I like to think that the striking visual style of the L.G.B. volumes factored in their popularity, as well. The books relied on a relatively small pool of talented illustrators, the contributions of whom lent the books a certain polish lacking in competing kid-book lines from Rand McNally and Whitman. There was the aforementioned Gustaf Tenggren, a master in controlled whimsy, Eloise Wilkin, whose specialized in cloying yet nuanced portraits of young children and babies, the delightful animals of Richard Scarry, John P. Miller’s clean, color-saturated modernism, and the astonishing, all-around brilliance of Leonard Weisgard. Many of their ‘50s-era Little Golden Books are still in print, owing to the artists’ longevity. All are worthy of rediscovery by curious adults.
Most success stories combine elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Little Golden Books summarily did so by offering cozy, family-friendly stories and delightful illustrations (familiar) at a low price point (unfamiliar) in retailers that went beyond the usual book and department stores (unfamiliar). I’m using their example in the process of writing and marketing my own, as-yet-unpublished, adult-oriented book. Anyhow, that’s as good an excuse as any to enjoy these books anew.
