Little Golden Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Little Golden Books launched in October 1942 with twelve titles on store shelves and a price tag of just 25 cents. That was a deliberate act of disruption in a market where comparable children's books sold for two to three dollars. The question the series asked from day one was simple: why should a beautifully illustrated book for children be a luxury item? The answer shaped one of the most durable publishing franchises in American history.

  By the time the series celebrated its golden anniversary in 1992, Golden Books claimed that a billion and a half copies had been sold. One title alone, The Poky Little Puppy, became the top-selling children's book of all time in the United States. The series that began with staple-bound volumes of 42 pages grew to include records, tapes, videos, CD-ROMs, toys, and biographies of figures from The Beatles to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  How did a low-cost children's imprint born in wartime become a permanent fixture of American childhood? And what does it mean that a copy of The Poky Little Puppy bought today looks essentially the same as one printed more than eight decades ago?

• 2. A 25-Cent Idea

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  Georges Duplaix, head of Artists and Writers Guild Inc., had a clear target: children's books that were colorful, durable, and affordable, unlike anything then on the market. He brought the idea to Albert Leventhal and Leon Shimkin at Simon & Schuster, who were already sharing a printing plant with Western Printing and Lithographing Company in Racine, Wisconsin.

  The team planned twelve titles, each 42 pages long. Of those pages, 28 would be printed in two colors and 14 in four colors. They initially considered a price of 50 cents, but hesitation over existing competition pushed them lower. By doubling the print run to 50,000 copies per title rather than 25,000, they calculated they could bring the price down to 25 cents each.

  Mary Reed, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, served as the series' first editor. The first 12 titles were printed in September 1942 and reached stores in October. Three editions totaling 1.5 million books sold out within five months. The partnership between Simon & Schuster and Western, first tested in 1938 with a joint release called A Children's History, had proven what a scaled print run could accomplish.

• 3. The People Behind the Pages

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  Dorothy A. Bennett, an editor at Simon & Schuster, worked alongside Duplaix from the start and eventually became the editor of the franchise. She brought in authors and illustrators including Margaret Wise Brown, Clement Hurd, Edith Thacher Hurd, and Garth Williams. Bennett also introduced Little Golden Records in 1948, among the first recorded books made for children.

  Illustrators who passed through the series went on to shape the broader field of children's publishing. Gustaf Tenggren, who illustrated both Bedtime Stories and The Poky Little Puppy in the original 1942 launch, was joined over the years by Tibor Gergely, Feodor Rojankovsky, Corinne Malvern, Eloise Wilkin, and Garth Williams, all of whom became influential figures in the industry.

  Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of Bank Street Nursery School, joined the series and brought a commitment to realistic storytelling. Discussions between Mitchell and Duplaix had begun as early as 1943, but wartime shortages delayed a dedicated Bank Street series until 1946. That year saw two titles: Mitchell's own The New House in the Forest, illustrated by Eloise Wilkins, and The Taxi That Hurried, co-authored by Irma Simonton Black and Jessie Stanton, with illustrations by Tibor Gergely.

• 4. Changing Hands

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  In 1958, Simon & Schuster sold its interest in Little Golden Books to Western Publishing. The price of a single book rose to 29 cents in 1962, a modest adjustment after two decades at a quarter. Western went on to expand the line, introducing Big Little Golden Books for children aged five and up, mixing original stories like The House That Had Enough with reprints such as The Monster at the End of This Book.

  In the 1980s, Golden Books added Golden Melody Books, which contained electronic chips that played music when a reader opened the cover. Songs ranged from Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to People in Your Neighborhood from Sesame Street and Heigh-Ho from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  In 2001, Random House acquired the series for about $85 million, after the parent company had filed for bankruptcy twice in two years. By that point, nearly 15 million copies of The Poky Little Puppy had been sold, across multiple languages. Today, Penguin Random House is the series' publisher.

• 5. Licensed Worlds

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  The series drew on licensed characters early and often. Properties from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Disney, Looney Tunes, The Muppets, Sesame Street, Woody Woodpecker, Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Barbie, Power Rangers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Thomas the Tank Engine have all appeared in Little Golden Books. Television personalities including Hopalong Cassidy, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Captain Kangaroo, and Mister Rogers also received their own titles.

  In 2015, Little Golden Book adaptations of the first six Star Wars films arrived on August 25, and the adaptation of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith became the first Little Golden Book drawn from a film rated PG-13 by the MPAA. Months later, on the 12th of April 2016, an adaptation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens followed. That pair opened the door to further PG-13 adaptations, including the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, properties from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Jurassic Park.

  The series has also published biographies, with subjects including The Beatles, Bee Gees, Taylor Swift, Betty White, Dolly Parton, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 2023, the Taylor Swift biography became the fastest-selling in the series' history, moving one million copies in seven months.

• 6. An Enduring Object

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  In 2010, artist Ryan Jude Novelline revealed the Golden Book Gown, a one-of-a-kind piece constructed almost entirely from Golden Books. Its skirt covered 22,000 square inches of page-turning surface, with a form-fitting bodice made from the spines of the books themselves.

  In 2000, Encore Software brought six titles to CD-ROM, including The Poky Little Puppy, Mother Goose, Tootle, and The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Those six releases were among the first major software titles produced entirely in Macromedia Flash.

  In 2015, during Disneyland's Diamond celebration, Disney Imagineers recreated a scene from the 1955 Little Golden Book story Little Man of Disneyland. They built a version of Patrick Begorra's home inside a tree trunk in Adventureland, where visitors could go looking for it. A children's book from 1955 had become a piece of park architecture sixty years later, which says something about how deeply a well-made object at 25 cents can embed itself in a culture.