In Golden Times

These days, the ideal publishing scenario for a commercial property is 1) to land a licensing deal, 2) get a co-branding partner; 3) issue in mutiple formats; and 4) penetrate the mass market. Think: NASCAR, a Disney character, downloadable content and a big display at Costco. But that's a combination pioneered more than 60 years ago, in the heady days of the Golden Books franchise, when licensing and co-branding were stunning new ideas, as was accompanying a book with an LP and getting your product line into supermarkets. The lively story of such innovations, and much more, is told inLeonard S. Marcus's forthcoming Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way.

Marcus's book, as he says in the introduction, is also “a tale of two cities [and] two industries.” The industries are printing and publishing; the cities are Racine, Wis., where Western Printing was founded in 1907, and New York City, where in 1935 the printer established an editorial outpost to provide product for its presses. The famous Little Golden Book series, begun in 1942, was principally the idea of two men and a woman: a young sales manager at Simon & Schuster named Albert Leventhal; George Duplaix, the French-born Western executive who headed up the New York office; and Lucille Ogle, his second in command. The rest is history, but it is hardly the end of the story. While Western went on to become one of the most successful printers in the country and for a time the world's largest publisher of children's books, one of Leventhal's underlings at Simon & Schuster (Western's original partner in the venture) was Dick Snyder, who later became chairman of S&S. In a sad irony, it was Snyder who, after his ouster from S&S in 1992, bought Western and its Golden Books properties. However, bankruptcy soon followed, resulting in the sale of Golden's assets to Random House in 2001. Happily, Random House has continued the Golden Books line, reissuing beloved classics and commissioning new titles for a new generation of readers.

The excerpt below is adapted from Golden Legacy; it covers a portion of the postwar period and shows the undertaking of innovations that even today are considered the savviest of publishing. Random House/Golden will publish Golden Legacy in October.

—Ed.

In 1947, Simon & Schuster opened a major new channel for the sale of Golden Books by introducing the 25-cent books to supermarkets. The unconventional plan hinged on a series of new alliances forged with the nation's food brokers, a network of distributors whose existence, until then, had not been seen as relevant to publishers. The Jewel Tea and Food Fair chains were the first to carry the Golden line. Within a year, Little Golden Books could be purchased in more than 1,200 supermarkets nationwide.

In 1948, the publisher circulated an elaborate four-page advertising piece, with illustrations by an unknown artist named Richard Scarry, recounting in tongue-in-cheek fairy tale fashion the details of the company's latest sales masterstroke. The logic of the ad, which was aimed at persuading laggard food merchants to make a place in their stores for Golden's highly profitable display racks, was unassailable: “Turnover? As fast as in canned goods. Just put them out and s-w-i-s-h!—they're gone!” Not only were the racks free, the advertisement pointed out, but stocking the books entailed no financial risk whatsoever. “Guaranteed sale means... they're 100% returnable.” Simon & Schuster had been the first publisher to allow its retail customers to return unsold copies of a book for a full refund—a practice that had rattled the industry when it was introduced in the 1920s. The arrangement worked so well as an incentive that other publishers felt compelled to offer comparable terms of sale; eventually, a return policy became the industry standard.

As the Golden partners extended their reach into new sales channels, they also experimented with new media. In the fall of 1948, Little Golden Records debuted with a list of 12 78-rpm records selling for 25 cents apiece. Each durable bright yellow disk came wrapped in a decorative board sleeve approximately the size of a Little Golden Book. A story text was printed on the inside sleeve. The idea had come from the suggestion cards that Simon & Schuster had inserted in some of the first Little Golden Books. Busy parents had expressed their frustration at not having enough time in their day to reread the stories aloud to their children. Mitch Miller, the bandleader later known for the popular television program Sing Along with Mitch, conducted his orchestra on recordings that featured musical settings composed by Alec Wilder, Ruth Cleary Patterson, Miller himself and others. In the venture's first few years, an extraordinary roster of performers lent their talents to the enterprise, including Jimmy Durante, Hoagy Carmichael, Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Burgess Meredith, Danny Kaye, Art Carney and the Milton Berle Show's “Men of Texaco” quartet.

During the immediate postwar years, Golden faced its first serious competition. Challenges to Golden's domination of the budget picture book market came from the Samuel Lowe Company's Bonnie Books, Rand McNally's very similar Elf Books series and, most formidably, from Wonder Books, begun in 1946 through a partnership arrangement between Grosset & Dunlap and the Curtis Publishing Company, with distribution handled by Random House. Random's highly competitive president, Bennett Cerf, had long envied his friends and rivals Richard Simon and Max Schuster for the spectacular payoff they'd reaped from their Golden gamble. Wonder Books was Cerf's attempt to play catchup.

Not surprisingly, an effort was made to raid the Golden stable. Golden countered by attempting to lock in its marquee authors and artists with long-term contracts. As part of the elaborate courtship of Margaret Wise Brown, an editor traveled to Brown's primitive Maine island cottage with a cartload of bricks and, with illustrator J. P. Miller to assist her, built a much-needed fireplace for the house. Brown appreciated the gesture, but contract negotiations bogged down after she realized that the terms of the agreement changed with each new exchange with Ogle and the often absent Duplaix. Exasperated, and not long before she broke off negotiations altogether, Brown wrote Duplaix in France that he should be glad there was an ocean between them. “If you don't make good on your word I will be over to shoot you with a bow and arrow in August.”

Meanwhile, the Golden juggernaut rolled on as, from 1949, Simon & Schuster licensed the Little Golden name to manufacturers of a dizzying array of children's merchandise, including jewelry, barrettes, wallpaper, T-shirts, fabric and curtains. That year saw the launch of Les Petits Livres d'Or, French-language editions of Little Golden Books, published by Flammarion, and the finalizing of plans for foreign editions to be published in Germany, Italy and Spain. Such partnership arrangements were facilitated in part by Western's own evolving international interests as an outgrowth of the company's wartime government contract work. Under the Marshall Plan, Western played a pivotal role in the revival of Italy's publishing industry, providing equipment and technical support to the country's largest house, Mondadori. In the years that followed, Mondadori became the Italian publisher of Golden Books.

Notwithstanding the new competition at home, the future of Little Golden Books looked bright indeed. As Western's in-house magazine, the Westerner, noted, “The fact remains that more Golden Books are bought in America than the story books of all juvenile publishers combined.” In 1942, the sale of one and a half million Little Golden Books had more than sufficed in making a strong impression on the publishing industry; eight years later, Simon & Schuster sold four times as many in February alone.

To hold costs to a minimum, the publisher offered flat-fee payments to most of its artists and writers. Many Little Golden Books were simply staff-written. In 1950, the nanny employed in Richard Simon's household stood poised to become the author of one of the bestselling Little Golden Books of all time. After remarking to Simon one day on his son's fascination with Band-Aids, Helen Gaspard had suggested that a Little Golden Book might somehow be fashioned from the material. Simon agreed and encouraged Gaspard to write the story herself. At the same time, he passed the idea on to Albert Leventhal (who by then had moved over to the Simon & Schuster side of the Golden partnership), who presented it to the staff. Soon everyone interested in impressing the boss was having a turn. In the end, however, it was Gaspard who received credit and a modest flat fee as the author of Little Golden Book No. 111—Doctor Dan the Bandage Man.

Simon had been quick to recognize a marketing opportunity. With the manuscript in hand, he contacted Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of Band-Aids, to gauge possible interest in a collaboration. His idea to link two universally recognized brands through a joint sales and advertising campaign was warmly received. Johnson & Johnson agreed to supply the publisher with nine million Band-Aids to be inserted, six each, into the books; to advertise Doctor Dan in Life magazine and, more remarkably, on television; and to order 550,000 copies for sale in drugstores from specially designed counter racks with display space built in for both Band-Aids and books. The first print run was set at 1.5 million—a new Little Golden record. To further pique the public's interest, Simon composed ad copy that told a Thurberesque backstory, in which Simon claimed to have telegrammed a friend at Johnson & Johnson with the message: “PLEASE SHIP TWO MILLION BAND-AIDS IMMEDIATELY.” The next day's telegrammed reply: “BAND-AIDS ON THEIR WAY. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU?”