Author Bowers John Hugh
E. Haldeman-Julius (né Emanuel Julius) (30 July 1889 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania –31 July 1951 Girard, Kansas) was an American social reformer and publisher. Emanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia on the son of a bookbinder. His parents were Jewish emigrants who fled Russia and immigrated to America to escape religious persecution.[1] As a boy, Emanuel, too, was harassed for being Jewish, resulting in a disdain for all religion as an adult. After leaving school at the age of 15, he worked at a variety of menial jobs. All the while, he read voraciously. Because literature and pamphlets produced by the socialists were inexpensive, Julius read them and became convinced of their truth.[2] He joined the Socialist Party before World War I.[1] Haldeman-Julius is most noted as the editor of Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper with a large national circulation that was mentioned, among other places, in the Jack London novel The Iron Heel, and later for publishing the Little Blue Books (ment
...ioned by Louis L'Amour in his autobiography Education of a Wandering Man). Along with his wife, Marcet Haldeman (whose last name he adopted in hyphenate), Julius was an activist who published muckraking newspapers until he came upon the idea of publishing cheaply-printed classic literature for the masses. After purchasing the printing operation of the "Appeal to Reason" in Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius began printing books on cheap pulp paper (similar to that used in pulp magazines), stapled and bound with a plain (usually) blue paper cover. They were first sold in 1919 for 25 cents; before long the price dropped to 5 cents. Many titles of classic literature were given lurid titles in order to increase sales. Eventually, many thousands of copies per year were sold and were popular with the so-called "drifters" of the 1920s to the 1950s. Haldeman-Julius and his wife became wealthy from the venture. The couple had two children: Alice Haldeman-Julius Deloach (b. 1917 - d. 1991) and Henry Haldeman-Julius (b. 1919) (who later changed his name to Henry Julius Haldeman). They adopted Josephine Haldeman-Julius Roselle (b. 1910). Marcet and Emanuel legally separated in 1934. Marcet died in 1941, and a year later Haldeman-Julius married Susan Haney, an employee. Henry continued the business after Emanuel's death. Haldeman-Julius drowned in his swimming pool July 31, 1951[3]. His son Henry took over his father's publishing efforts, and the books continued to be sold until the printing house burned down on July 4, 1978[3]. Haldeman-Julius' papers are held at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, a few miles down the road from Girard in the southeastern corner of the state. [3] Rolf Potts on E. Haldeman-Julius in The Believer
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