Big Little Books

I was given this Big Little Book years ago by my mother.  But I only learned last week what it was.

I learned about Big Little Books thanks to Larry Lowery. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He is affiliated with the Graduate School of Education for his research and with the Lawrence Hall of Science for his curriculum products. As luck would have it, he was next to me in the registration line at the recent NSTA show. We started chatting. I told him about Science4Us, he told me about FOSS.  We did some card tricks.

All of the material on this post is from Larry's website: http://biglittlebooks.com.

 In 1932 the seemingly paradoxical term Big Little Book® was given to certain books published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. The term promised the buyer a great amount of reading material and pleasure (BIG) within a small and compact (LITTLE) book. These Whitman books set the standards for similar books, and Whitman's copyrighted description has become popularized in a generic way to umbrella similar books.

The Whitman BLBs look like a four-inch block sawed off the end of a two-by-four. They were 3 5/8" x 4 1/2" x 1 1/2" in size and 432 pages in length. The outstanding feature of the books was the captioned picture opposite each page of text. The books originally sold for a dime (later 15¢).

Many children learned to read and have an appreciation for all books because of their experiences with BLBs. The source material for the books was drawn mostly from radio, comic strips, and motion pictures.

Larry's website categorizes the history in three periods (Golden, 1932-38; Silver, 1938-49; Modern 1950 to present), lists collectors and clubs, and has a host of articles about Big Little Books. Check it out at http://biglittlebooks.com.

On a related book, this blog also has an article about the Little Golden Books.