Little Pink Books
The Little Pink Books gather together some of the essential wisdom from Ruby’s career. Modeled on the idea of affordable, accessible, and easy-to-carry publications that aim to widely share ideas, the Little Pink Books are a survival guide to building and conserving an art world that serves all of us.
Contact Ruby if you would like to purchase a set!
Little Blue Books
I bought my first Little Blue Book many years ago at a vintage store in Park City, Utah, while attending the Sundance Film Festival. I was intrigued by this small 3 ½ x 5 inch book with a slogan on the back: “A University in Print-Read the World Over.” Who could resist that? It was many years later before I actually researched the story of these books. And I fell in love. Here is a summary of the Wikipedia entry:
Little Blue Books were published from 1919 through 1978. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and his wife Marcet set out to publish small low price paperback pocketbooks whose goal was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, philosophy, history, and common sense knowledge out to as large an audience as possible. The books were designed to fit into a working man’s back pocket, and their tagline was “A University in Print-Read the World Over.”
Somewhere between 300 and 500 million booklets were sold over that almost 60 year period of time. When they purchased the publishing house in Girard, Kansas in 1919, they also got the 175,000 names from the subscriber list of Appeal to Reason, which they used to make a pre-publication offer of $5, for which you would receive 50 booklets throughout the year. 5,000 readers took him up on his offer and the $25,000 he raised ($428,195 in today’s dollars) allowed him to start printing. They were printing 24,000 works a day in 1919.
He was a guerilla marketing genius and the books caught on all over the world and influenced a lot of prominent people. If a book sold fewer than 10,000 copies in a year, he would remove it from the list, but not before trying a new title. He took a title by Guy de Maupassant, “The Tallow Ball,” which had sold only 15,000 copies, and changed its title to “A French Prostitute’s Sacrifice.” It sold nearly 55,000 copies.
When Haldeman-Julius died in 1951, there were 1,873 active titles.
Why do I love this story? I love it because of its utopian vision–that knowledge shouldn’t be limited to a wealthy few. But I also love it because it is a genius marketing story. We usually believe that artists or that people who are politically progressive aren’t good business people. The success of The Little Blue Books tells a very different and inspiring story!