In the 1970’s, the CBC-TV long lived, weekly panel show Front Page Challenge featured a mystery object segment that had special significance for me, as I’m sure it did for many of my generation across Canada. The object, as it turned out, was The Big Little Book, a children’s publishing phenomenon of the 1930’s and 40’s.
I forget whether the question stumped the panel or not but it was apparent, afterwards, that the aging, often crabby Gordon Sinclair remembered them fondly. He had been trying to acquire a few, he said, and although he’d been offering $50 each for any in good condition he’d only found six.
Even then, some 30 years ago, they were as scarce here as hen’s teeth…almost! And so, I’d found in years of seeking, they’d become in the US as well.
Yet in the late 30’s through the 40’s just about every kid I knew of my age in Sussex had a collection of them. They were small, about 4 ½ x 3 ½ inches, yet quite thick, 352 to 432 pages usually. The best of the several companies that produced books in similar formats were the originators, Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. They sold in Canada for 15 cents each. Most of us traded them with friends regularly but all of us had favourites we kept as part of permanent collections.
The genuine Big Little Book was the brain child of Sam Lowe, president of Whitman’s sales division. Lowe had in the 1920’s persuaded F.W. Woolworth Company and other retail store giants to sell children’s books all year, not only during the Christmas season as had been their practice. Books for pre-teens were a mainstay of Whitman’s, a wing of Western Printing and Lithographing Company, who also manufactured jigsaw puzzles and board games.
In 1932, after conceiving the idea of a ‘cube’ book sized to fit a school kid’s pocket, Lowe named them The Big Little Book, and had the company’s art department make prototypes of three titles with either a drawing or a still photo from a movie on the right pages and story text facing on the left. Lowe took those three prototypes to New York City and returned a few days later with orders for 25,000 books, without one even having been printed.
For exciting subject matter, Lowe entered into contracts with motion picture giants like Walt Disney, MGM, RKO and several daily comic strip syndicates making Whitman’s the first company ever licensed to reproduce daily and weekend comic strip characters such as Mickey Mouse Donald Duck, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Little Orphan Annie and such movie stars as Katharine Hepburn, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard and many others in any standard book form. Big Little Books were, therefore, the progenitor of comic books which did not make an appearance until a couple of years later.
John Harmon, publisher of several Nostalgia Catalogues over the years, says: “Personally I liked Big Little Books better than comics. They were real books, those Big Little Books. Although kid’s called comics ‘comic books’, when they came on the market, they weren’t really books at all…not like Big Little Books.”
And, while parents frowned on comics during those dark depression and war years, because of the fact Whitman, along with Saalfield and other publishers who adapted similar formats, ‘novelized’ comics, movies, classics and original stories, they were accepted as having a certain literary value. Aunts and uncles could, without any pang of conscience, give them as Christmas and birthday presents to nieces and nephews, even depression impoverished parents could feel good about giving a couple to their children on such occasions by the same reasoning, and to watch their eyes light up at the sight of those excitingly colourful covers. Although only 15 cents they were presents that most kids loved and read with delight.
When I think of how many of them existed in a town the size of Sussex, where I grew up, it’s hard to believe that in the half century since the last ‘real’ Big Little Books, or Better Little Books as Whitman’s called them after 1938 (since Saalfield’s had named their line, confusingly, Little Big Books), were published they have become such rare finds even in antique stores.
A Moncton internet book dealer told me recently of getting $137 US for The Shadow and The Ghost Makers, a very common one among students in my early school years. I remember, however, trading three Big Little Books and 18 comic ‘books’ to an older student for a Shadow and The Living Death copy that was really rare by that time, toward the end of World War Two.
At the time of the Front Page Challenge flashback I had about 170 of them and have added more since. Dedications in many ‘previously owned’ copies I’ve acquired like ‘To Vernon from Marguerette, May 19/35, Happy Birthday’ bear out the fact that they were a very popular gift even then in NB and for years after.
I bought my first Better Little Book, King Of The Royal Mounted and The Great Jewel Mystery (written by Romer Grey from an outline by his father Zane Grey), in 1939 while I was in Grade One at Sussex Consolidated School. A next door neighbour’s daughter, Myrtle Goold, who had started school that same year, told me an interesting story about that purchase at our 50th Graduation Reunion in 2000. The year before she’d been in Sussex visiting relatives, and passing the town’s Broadway Café saw an old friend, Frances Helyar whom she’d worked with in Hamilton, Ontario, seated at a table inside.
Surprised, she went in and gasped: “Frances whatever are you doing in this part of the world?” Frances explained that she’d moved to Saint John some years before to try and make a living singing in clubs and other venues. She’d recently released a CD.
“Gee, I went to school here with a guy who writes about music in The Telegraph- Journal,” Myrtle told her. “You should talk with him.”
Frances explained she knew me and I’d already written about her. Myrtle told her she’d been with me the day I’d bought my first book.
“His mother gave him ten cents to buy a Montreal Standard,” she said, “but Gamblin’s Drug Store had sold out of them, so he went across to Stedman’s, put a nickel he had with the dime and bought a book.”
That was the first of quite a few Big Little Books I purchased at Stedman’s until wartime measures late in 1940 cut most book imports. The next year, however, a wall of used ones appeared in Van Wart’s Restaurant on Broad Street in Sussex and I began stopping there often on my way home from school. They’d bought ‘a trunk load of ’em’ at a second hand store in Boston, Mr. Van Wart told me, and he’d decided to sell them for a nickel each since his family had all read them.
Another vivid memory of mine concerning those Big Little Books is the morning in 1946 that Everett Lounsbury, head of the Sussex Cheese and Butter Company’s ice cream division, took his big La Salle limousine out of their garage for the first time since war-time rationing of gas was imposed and drove Mrs. Lounsbury, their daughter Grace, son Fred, a mutual friend Raymond Thorne and I to Moncton. In Eaton’s we discovered the first display of new Better Little Books we’d seen in five years and I bought three: a Buck Rogers, a King Of The Royal Mounted and a Tailspin Tommy, in a new series called ‘All Picture’ which dispensed with novelizing in favour of comic word balloons. I didn’t realize until months later that these had actually been printed in 1942 before the US itself, feeling the pinch of war following Pearl Harbour, had curtailed all such printing and distribution. And, because of our Canadian embargos before that, they had never been for sale in Canada until that week.
When new Better Little Books began to appear later that year, increased publishing costs had bought about a format change. The books were now a regular 327 pages instead of the 429 that had been the norm since 1936. By the 50’s new titles had ceased to be issued as the television age filled much of a child’s leisure time.
A talk I had recently with a book dealer here in Saint John sent me on a computer search for information on the Whitman Publishing Company and I was astounded at the wealth of Big Little Book knowledge and lore to be found on the world-wide net. There’s even a collective you can join, The Big Little Book Club, by writing them at PO Box 1242, Danville, CA 94526, USA and enclosing $18 in US funds. The club holds show and sell meetings from time to time, mostly in Texas and California, but there was one recently in Maine. Members receive six issues of the Big Little Times newsletter yearly, are given access to continuously updated club books for sale listings and several other perks.
And here is something to watch for! A new omnibus hitting book stores in mid-December 2004, The Big Big Little Book Book: An Overstreet Photo Journal Guide by Arnold T. Blumberg, published by Gemstone Publishing will have 2000 photos of Big Little Books in colour, a perfect gift for holidays and birthdays for those of us who remember them so nostalgically.
If you have access to the internet and want to learn more about all this, visit: http://www.biglittlebooks.com/whitman.html
The sad part of this is that Whitman no longer publishes children’s books and Western no longer exists. On the other hand the first Big Little Book published by them, The Adventures of Dick Tracy can fetch $2000 in mint condition, so be sure to check your family’s attic. No, I haven’t got one, but I sure wish I’d tucked away a dozen or two.