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Emanuel Haldeman-Julius Emanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 30, 1880 to David Julius, a book-binder, and Elizabeth Zamost. Haldeman-Julius’s parents were both Jewish immigrants from Odessa, Ukraine who had come to America in 1887 in search of a better life. Upon their arrival in America, they changed their original name of Zolajefsky to Julius. Emanuel was raised surrounded by books on all subjects. His love for them increased as he grew older, and even after he dropped out of school in the seventh grade, his education did not end. As a teenager, Julius worked as a movie usher and bellhop before he found his place in the world as an intellectual. After Julius was approached by several radicals, he was persuaded to join the American Socialist party. In his early twenties he worked as a socialist journalist and wrote articles for the International Socialist Review, The Call in New York, The Leader in Milwaukee, and Chicago World in Chicago. A turning point in Julius’s life came when the once popular Appeal to Reason began to founder, and Haldeman-Julius, in an attempt to salvage the newspaper moved to the small mid-western town of Girard, Kansas. In Girard, Julius met Anna Marcet Haldeman, a feminist and a playwright. They married in 1916, and changed their surnames to Julius. The couple had two children. In 1919, Haldeman-Julius, with a loan from his wife, bought the presses of the Appeal to Reason and began printing the first of the small paperback books which soon became the foundation for his Little Blue Books Series. As a teenager, Haldeman-Julius had been enchanted by Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and dreamed of making good literature available to the masses at a cheap price. The Rubaiyat was the first book produced by the Haldeman- Julius Publishing Company, and it sold for twenty-five cents. Next came Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Haldeman-Julius had found his niche, and he became phenomenally successful almost at once. He believed that there were millions of readers who could not afford handsome, hardcover books, so he began to mass produce paperback books, all with the same blue, nondescript cover, all the same 3.5 by 5 inches, all printed in eight-point type on cheap paper, and a few with as many as eighty pages. At first, Haldeman-Julius merely reprinted classics such as Plato, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Hugo, and sold them through newspaper and magazine ads. By increasing his production in response to the surging numbers of orders he received, Haldeman-Julius was able to offer each book at five cents and still make a considerable profit. The fame of the Little Blue Books was worldwide. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Admiral Richard Byrd, who took along a complete set to the South Pole, Franklin P. Adams, and thousands of common working people who wanted good reading materials were customers of Haldeman-Julius’s mail order business. In only ten short years, Haldeman had sold over 150 million copies of 1500 different titles, and the small project had become a gigantic publishing venture. In accordance with his great success, Haldeman-Julius was praised by the St. Louis Post Dispatch as "The Henry Ford of literature", and the Chicago Daily News began calling Girard, Kansas the "Literary Capital of the United States". In The First Hundred Million (1928), Haldeman-Julius explains that he merely tapped into the bottomless American desire for self-improvement. When he recognized that hunger, he began producing practical "how-to" books – knot-tying, masonry, dessert cookery, furniture refinishing, and healthcare. He then moved into basic education: Chemistry Self-Taught, Italian Self-Taught, Sociology Self-Taught, and so forth. He found another huge market in ethnic jokes, proverbs, and anecdotes. But ideas, especially philosophical and religious ideas, were his favorite topics, and he invited such thinkers as Will Durant, Clarence Darrow, Mararet Sanger, and Joseph McCabe to write for the Little Blue Books. An agnostic anticleric, Haldeman-Julius once wrote, "I have been accused of saturating the series with skeptical books because I wish to print propaganda…and thus convert everyone to my own way of thinking." He then promptly agreed with his accusers. If a title sold less than ten thousand copies per year, Haldeman-Julius took it to the "hospital", where it was "rejuvenated." Often that meant simply retitling the text, as in the case of Francis Bacon’s Apothegms, which became Terse Truths about the Riddle of Life. However, sometimes, it meant editing, as when "the duller portions" were taken out of Tennyson’s Lady of the Lake. Haldeman-Julius wrote two novels with his wife, Marcet Haldeman-Julius. Their 1921 bestseller, Dust told of the drudgery of farm life on the Kansas plains. Their second book, Violence! in 1929, was also successful. A separation in 1934 ended their collaboration. Marcet Haldeman-Julius died in 1941, and shortly afterward Haldeman-Julius married an employee, Susan Haney; the marriage produced no children. Ten years later, Haldeman-Julius drowned in his swimming pool in Girard, Kansas. Just before his death, he was convicted of income tax evasions. Haldeman-Julius was frequently criticized for his sensational methods of promoting books, his frequent lapses from good taste, and his tendency toward self-aggrandizement. But despite these flaws, Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius will forever be remembered for revolutionizing America’s reading habits, and as a man who built a childhood dream into reality, and contributed greatly to the education of the masses of America. Written by Digeng Du, Spring 2001 Bibliography: |
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