Picture Perfect: Why Golden Books are golden

by Claudia Anderson
06/29/2009

It may not have been quite Periclean Athens or Florence under the Medicis, but the eruption of creativity that constituted the quarter-century ascendancy of the Little Golden Books was dazzling enough in its own right, a remarkable convergence of artistic and commercial genius. The exhibition now touring the country of 60 original paintings for this lavishly illustrated children's book line--astonishingly vibrant works of art in their own right--tells a multilayered story of American popular culture at its best.

It begins in 1942, when Simon and Schuster's Little Golden Books burst upon the publishing scene and into the nurseries of America. Printed on fairly good paper, with cardboard covers and the trademark golden element on the cover (later the spine), the books were priced at 25 cents, one-sixth to one-eighth of what the Babar books or Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel were then selling for. Drugstores, five-and-dimes, and train stations willing to sell them were given special display racks. Within five months, the first dozen titles, mostly folk tales and nursery rhymes and prayers in the public domain, had sold a million and a half copies, and The Poky Little Puppy, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, was on its way to becoming the best-selling English-language children's picture book of all time.

That was only the beginning. In 1947, the Little Goldens appeared in supermarkets. Available and affordable in towns too small to have a bookstore, they democratized quality picture books for children. By 1959, more than 150 titles had sold over a million copies each.
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