'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.

The poky little puppy golden books