There’s a good chance you grew up reading the adventures of The Poky Little Puppy, Tootle, or Scuffy the Tugboat in the pages of Little Golden Books. But how much do you know about the story behind these beloved tales?
Before the introduction of Little Golden Books in 1942, children’s books weren’t necessarily made with children’s interests in mind. They were usually large volumes that were too difficult for young readers to handle or comprehend, and were awfully expensive at $2 to $3 each (that’s about $28 – $42 today). But George Duplaix of the Artist’s and Writer’s Guild, in partnership with Simon & Schuster Publications and Western Printing, wanted to change all that.
Duplaix thought the solution was small, sturdy, inexpensive books with fewer pages, simpler stories, and more illustrations so little kids could actually enjoy them. Western was already publishing a line for kids called Golden Books, so Duplaix and his team piggy-backed on those marketing efforts, calling the new line Little Golden Books.
The first 12 titles were released on October 1, 1942, at a price of only a quarter a piece. They were an instant success. After only five months on the market, 1.5 million copies had been sold and many titles were already in their third printing; by 1945, most were in their seventh printing. One of the keys to their sales success was the fact that they were available in unusual places, such as department stores, drug stores, and supermarkets. Busy parents could keep rambunctious children occupied while they ran errands, and not feel guilty about the additional 25 cents tacked onto their final bills.
The Little Golden Books’ original 12 titles were:
Three Little Kittens
Bedtime Stories
The Alphabet A – Z
Mother Goose
Prayers for Children
The Little Red Hen
Nursery Songs
The Poky Little Puppy
The Golden Book of Fairy Tales
Baby’s Book
The Animals of Farmer Jones
This Little Piggy
The Poky Little Puppy was and still is the most popular of these original titles, helping it become the best-selling children’s book of the 20th century (a total of 14,898,341 copies were sold). But Poky isn’t the only Little Golden Book with impressive numbers. Many of the original 12 rounded out the Top 10 of the century, too. Tootle (1945), about a locomotive-in-training, was third with over 8.5 million copies sold. Saggy Baggy Elephant (1947) was #7 with just under 7.5 million, and Scuffy the Tugboat (1955) came in at #8 with 7.3 million.
Overall, well over two billion Little Golden Books have been sold since 1942 in nearly every country across the globe—though they were banned for many years in the Soviet Union for being “too capitalist.”
The books, of course, couldn’t stay $0.25 forever, although it did take 20 years before the price jumped to $0.29. The price continued to rise over the years, but still stayed under a dollar for decades, finally threatening that threshold in 1986 when the price reached $0.99. Currently, Little Golden Books retail for $3.99. When you consider the buying power of a quarter back in 1942 was about $3.47 in today’s money, they’re still pretty easy on the pocketbook.
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