Big Little Books

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Big Little Books began in 1932, published by the Whitman Publishing Company in Racine, Wisconsin.

A typical Big Little Book was 3 5/8" wide and 4 1/2" high, with 212 to 432 pages making a 1 1/2" approximate thickness. The interior format usually displayed full-page b/w illustrations on the right side, facing the pages of text on the left. Stories were often tie-ins with radio programs (The Shadow), comic strips (The Gumps), children's books (Uncle Wiggily), novels (John Carter of Mars) and movies (Bambi). Later books in the series had interior color illustrations.

The first Big Little Book, The Adventures of Dick Tracy, was published in December 1932, and numerous titles were sold through Woolworth's and other retail chains during the 1930s. With a name change to Better Little Books in 1938, the series continued into the 1960s. Variations such as Dime Action Books appeared when other publishers entered the field, as noted by the Collecting Channel's Andy Hooper:

While the format was pioneered by Whitman Publishing, other firms including Van Wiseman, Saalfield, Goldsmith, Lynn and World Syndicate Publishing all produced Big Little Books between 1934 and 1960. Whitman was also the last to abandon the form, publishing Big Little Books about boomer characters like Major Matt Mason into the mid-1960s. Not all Big Little Books adhered to the original format of text on the left side and a large graphic on the right of each page spread, and the earlier, more heavily illustrated books are more valuable as a result... Dick Tracy was the hero of the first Big Little Book, and he was followed by almost every major cartoon, comic and radio character of the 1930s, including Alley Oop, Buck Rogers, Blondie and Dagwood, Li'l Abner, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Captain Midnight, Tarzan and dozens more. There were also numerous books published that featured original characters created particularly for the Big Little series, and those are now little remembered, usually selling for $10 or less each in any condition. A few titles were ostensibly non-fiction works about famous people, as with Whitman’s Billy The Kid (1935) and The Story of Jackie Cooper (1933), which proves that biographies of child movie stars are no recent phenomenon. [1]

In recent years, Robert Thibadeau's Antique Book project at Carnegie Mellon has made at least two Big Little Books available online. Instead of providing a fresh typographical look, Thibadeau attempts to "capture the entire production" of an old book with facsimile images showing pages with wear and tear. "We're basically trying to eternalize that book as it is," says Thibadeau. The Antique Books Digital Library offers two free Big Little Book titles, Tim McCoy on the Tomahawk Trail and Bronc Peeler The Lone Cowboy. Fred Harman's Bronc Peeler was a Western comic strip character who was a precursor to another strip drawn by Harman, the more successful Red Ryder.

Sam Mendes' film Road to Perdition (2002) showed a boy reading The Lone Ranger Big Little Book, but this was an anachronism since the movie takes place in 1931, a year prior to the first Big Little Books and two years before The Lone Ranger premiered January 31, 1933, on radio.

More than 1,300 Big Little Books and the many publishers are covered in Arnold T. Blumberg's The Big Big Little Book Book (Gemstone, 2004).