Ways of Collecting Haldeman-Julius Booklets
~ A Quick-and-Dirty Guide for the H-J Newbie ~

by Scot Kamins
© 2009

One of the great things about collecting is that there aren't any rules. It's your hobby, so you get to decide how, when, and what you'll collect. But most collectors, being by nature obsessive-compulsive types, like to add a few boundaries to their collecting to keep things interesting. Because of the real variety to H-J booklets, you can set up all kinds of boundaries and still have a great deal of fun -- and lots of challenges.

This article presents a set of eight ways to collect Haldeman-Julius booklets. There are many more ways than are listed here, but these should give you some ideas to get you started.

All Titles By Number

This is the traditional way to collect numbered series. All Haldeman-Julius small booklets (3.5" by 5") are numbered, making accumulating "by the numbers" a natural way to collect. The numbering for the same title carried over from series to series -- for example booklet #1, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- so you can pretty much ignore the series name (Appeal's Pocket Series, Ten Cent Pocket Series, Little Blue Books) and just try to get every different-numbered booklet.

But even though it seems simple, it's by no means easy: Starting around #1600, the higher the number the tougher the booklet is to find. For example, I have no booklets in my own collection with numbers above 1850.

Additionally, collecting one copy of every number will not give you a complete collection: Nearly 250 titles disappeared, to be replaced by new titles that re-used the original numbers. And some of these replacements were replaced! See (Nearly) Complete Checklist of Little Blue Books Cover Titles to see what you'll miss by collecting only numerically.

Sub-Series

Sub-series all begin with the same few words: Proverbs of ..., How to ..., A Book of ..., The History of ... and so on. They often cross genre boundaries: For example, The Art of sub-series includes such titles as The Art of Controversy, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant, and The Art of Kissing, while The History of includes The History of Rome, The History of Social Ideals, and The History of Venereal Diseases.

Here are some sub-series (skipping specific genre lists such as Life of, Philosophy of, Poems of, and the like) and the approximate number of titles in that sub-series:

Sub-Series	Title Count
Art of ...	8
Best Jokes [of/about] ...	13
Book of ...	35
Confessions of ...	7
Debate on ...	9
Dictionary of ...	10
Epigrams of ...	9
Essays on ...	27
Essence of ...	7
Facts [You Should Know] About ...	22
Famous ...	9
Great ...	15
Guide to ...	15
Hints on ...	15
History of ...	16
How to ...	122
Proverbs of ...	16
Psychology of ...	10
Socialism and ...	9
Story of ...	14
Truth About ...	11
What You Should Know About ...	9
Why I ...	19

Consistent Covers

The various Haldeman-Julius booklet series have a wide variety of both front covers and back covers. The variety provides a great opportunity for a collection that focuses on a consistent front and back cover.

Here's the challenge: Both front and back design variations entered the series over time. While most titles stayed in the series from their introduction to the series end, not all design combinations stayed around for long. It's tough to predict how many titles are available for a given combination of front and back designs. Additionally, few selling sites such as eBay and individual dealer websites show both the front and back covers of individual titles.

Follow That Title!

In this collecting variation, you collect a given title in all the colors, H-J series names, and cover designs you can find. This variation will be especially appealing to an author specialist: For example. a collector fond of Oscar Wilde can assemble a collection of at least a dozen varieties of #2 Ballad of Reading Gaol, available in seven series of Haldeman-Julius booklets from the beginning in 1919 until the end in 1978.

Even a later title like the one shown on the right, #1354 A Book of Striking Similes, was available in at least four colors and a variety of designs.

Stick To One Series

The idea is to collect as many titles as you can in a single H-J series. The older the series the fewer titles exist, but the harder the task. For example, the first series -- Appeal's Pocket Series -- has only 21 titles in it; but most collectors don't have a single one in their collections.

An easier series, although still challenging, is the Ten Cent Pocket Series. A number of its titles were replaced by others in later series, making the original titles scarce.

A variation on this theme is to collect all the H-J series, but make sure that each title you collect is in wrappers from the series in which it originally appeared. Thus you would collect #237, Baudelaire's Poems in Prose in the Appeal [as opposed to Appeal's with that 's at the end] Pocket Series; while this title is a common one, it is fairly tough to find in the Appeal wrapper. For an accounting of the series in which each title first appeared, see Determining the Original Series of an LBB Title.

Illustrated Covers

This is a great variation to collect. H-J decided to spruce up the series in the late 1940's due to flagging sales, so he started illustrating the covers. This was a radical departure from the plain text look of the previous 30 years or so, where cover graphic elements were limited to the occasional logo or variation in the back-cover line drawing of E H-J himself. (See front covers and back covers for examples of each.)

Many of the illustrations came in the same design but in three or four different colors (such as # 658 Toasts for All Occasions and #819 A Book of Strange Murders) but others such as #1824 How To Die Laughing in 62 Easy Lessons came in different designs.

No record exists of how many titles actually appeared with illustrated covers, but the section named Illustrated Covers attempts to catalog them.

Titles From The Morgue

This is probably the toughest way to collect Haldeman booklets -- only the 266 or so titles that were discontinued and replaced by others, recycling the series booklet number.

Use the lists in the article Discontinued & Substantially Modified Booklets, especially in the section Title Replaced with Entirely New Booklet.

E. Haldeman-Julius himself writes about the process of weeding out poorly selling titles in Chapter X, "The Morgue," of his 1928 book The First Hundred Million. A copy of that chapter was reproduced (perhaps edited a bit) in Big Blue Newsletter No. 4 of the Haldeman-Julius Collector's Club.

Ways of Collecting Haldeman-Julius Booklets ~ A Quick-and-Dirty Guide for the H-J Newbie ~