"Little Golden
Books was the brainchild of Georges
Duplaix, who in 1940 was head of Artists
and Writers Guild Inc., a division of Western
Publishing tasked with developing new children's books.
Each book would
have 42 pages, 28 printed in two-color, and 14 in four-color. The
books would be staple-bound. The group originally discussed a 50-cent
price for the books, but Western did not want to compete with other
50-cent books already on the market. The group calculated that if the
print run for each title was 50,000 copies instead of 25,000, the
books could affordably be sold for 25 cents each.
The
first 12 titles were printed in September 1942 and released to stores
in October:[4][5]
-
Three Little Kittens, by Marie Simchow Stern
-
Bedtime Stories, illus. Gustaf Tenggren
-
Mother Goose, by Phyllis Fraser, illus. Gertrude E. Espenscheid
-
Prayers for Children, by Rachel Taft Dixon
-
The Little Red Hen, illus. Rudolf Freund
-
Nursery Songs, by Leah Gale, illus. Corinne Malvern
-
The Alphabet from A to Z, by Leah Gale, illus. Vivienne Blake and Richard Peck
-
The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, by Winfield Scott Hoskins
-
The Animals of Farmer Jones, by Leah Gale, illus. Richard Scarry
-
This
Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes, by Phyllis
Cerf Wagner, illus. Roberta Harris Pfafflin Petty
(Wikipedia)
And they are still in print today...truly Golden!
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