| In 1919, a garrulous, freethinking journalist named E. Haldeman-Julius launched a cheap series called the Little Blue Books to raise funds for a struggling socialist newspaper. Quickly outgrowing their original audience, the five-cent, paper-covered volumes of radical politics, classic and modern literature, and do-it-yourself culture sold by the millions through the mail, in Little Blue Book shops, and in vending machines across North America. Readers including Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison perused 3-1/2-by-5 inch volumes of Marx and Shakespeare and studied topics from astronomy to evolution to zoology at home, in libraries, and on freight and subway trains. Their devotion to the series---and its publisher---transformed tiny Girard, Kansas, into the nation's most unlikely publishing center between the world wars.;Although popular with readers, Haldeman-Julius and the Little Blue Books represented what his stalwart contemporaries deplored in the modern industry. As publishers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago experimented unsuccessfully with paperbound editions to appeal to burgeoning postwar reading audiences, Haldeman-Julius produced flimsy, staple-bound volumes of 64 pages, limiting writers of new material to 15,000 words and requiring reprint editors to abridge classics accordingly. He could print 80,000 books in 8 hours, a tremendous volume that sent critics into fits about the states of publishing, literature, and Western civilization even as it enabled him to sell up to five hundred million books before his death in 1951.;This dissertation studies the Little Blue Books alongside discourses prevalent in consumer, political, educational, and industrial cultures during the series' heyday in the 1920s. Chapters explore the Little Blue Books as a contested historical event remembered variously for its early ideological agenda and for the subsequent politics of Haldeman-Julius's personality that came to dominate it; situate the series as a democratizing institution that participated in the controversial popularized knowledge movement; examine representations of "all-brow" readers in series' advertisements and ways that readers resisted Haldeman-Julius's delineation of reading and book ownership practices; interrogate the impact of standardization on the series' materiality, content, and reception; and reveal the Little Blue Books' convergences with and divergences from another "university in print," the Harvard Classics. |
