And that would happen over and over again.'Ĭourtesy of Penguin Random House Officer Renny Hoogerhuis poses with a copy of The Little Fat Policeman. And the mother, the father, would look at it and see that it was only 25 cents and they'd put it in the cart.

'And they'd be sitting in the shopping cart and they'd reach out to the rack and grab a book. 'Kids would come with their parents,' Marcus says. To that end, they were sold in department stores, train stations, drugstores and supermarkets. He says the printers, publishers, writers and artists who brought Golden Books to the market had a lofty goal - they wanted to 'democratize children's books,' making them both affordable and accessible. Marcus wrote The Golden Legacy: The Story of the Golden Books. So even if you could find one of these books in a store, only a certain percent of the population could afford to bring them home,' explains author Leonard Marcus. Up until then, children's books were found mostly in libraries or high-end book stores and were meant to be handled with care. The most obvious one was the price - they cost just 25 cents. There were a lot of reasons that Golden Books became an instant success when they were first published.

Those beloved books celebrate their 75th birthday this year.įirst introduced shortly after the start of World War II, many of them - such as The Tawny Scrawny Lion, The Saggy Baggy Elephant and The Poky Little Puppy - have become classics.

With their golden spines and brightly colored pictures, they begged to be grabbed off a shelf by a curious child - which is exactly what their creators intended. In the 1950s and '60s, if there were any children's books in a house, at least one of them was likely to be a Little Golden Book.

Golden books the poky little puppy