Word: haldeman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Philadelphia 56 years ago, 15-year-old Emanuel Julius invested a dime in a paperback edition of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was, as it turned out, the wisest investment of his life. As Julius recalls in The World of Haldeman-Julius, an anthology of his writings published last week (Twayne Publishers of New York; 288 pp.; $4). Wilde's poem did something to him. "Never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt hard as glass. I thought...
...time it was not thousands but millions. During his lifetime. Emanuel Julius -or Haldeman-Julius, the hyphenation he assumed after marrying Anna Marcet Haldeman-sold more than 300 million copies of his Little Blue Books, mostly for a nickel apiece, in one of the most successful mail-order businesses ever conceived...
...Cerulean Stream. To many readers a generation ago, the publishing capital of the U.S. was the tiny southeast Kansas town of Girard (pop. 2,500), whence Haldeman-Julius' Little Blue Books issued in a smudgy, cerulean stream that sometimes reached 65,000 a day. In newspaper ads from coast to coast he ran his enticing list of titles-eventually more than 2,000-and invited readers to clip the coupons. Among those who did were the late Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who took a supply to the South Pole, and a Texas oilman who bought 14 packages...
These and millions of other readers were lured not only by the biggest little bargain in publishing-a Little Blue Book measured 3½ in. by 5 in., contained anywhere from 32 to 128 pages-but by a catalogue as racy as it was comprehensive. Haldeman-Julius gathered his titles largely from the public and the public domain, combining sex with the classics, self-improvement with sex-all mailed in plain wrappers. Over 40 years, Little Blue Book editions of 29 Shakespearean plays sold 5,500,000 copies-but one sex-instruction pamphlet alone, What Married Women Should Know* produced...
When a book sold less than 10,000 copies a year, Haldeman-Julius often revived it by giving it a more provocative title. After Fleece of Gold, the Gautier story, was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, the market rose from 6,000 copies to 50,000 a year. Haldeman-Julius hired a stable of writers to grind out popular themes; by far the most prolific was an apostate priest in London, Joseph McCabe, who wrote on anything, and eventually produced more than 7,500,000 words at the rate of 10,000 a week...