More on Little Blue Books

Alright. I imagine some of you may have turned your noses up at yesterday’s post simply because you can’t appreciate the awesomeness that is Louis L’Amour. (Now there’s a writer who deserves a post of his own if I’m ever to make a clean breast of my earliest reading influences). But it got me thinking about the Little Blue Books publishing line that he mentions. It turns out L’Amour is far from the only author to remember the series fondly. Here’s more from Wikipedia:

“Many bookstores kept a book rack stocked with many Little Blue Book titles, and their small size and low price made them especially popular with travelers and transient working people. Louis L'Amour cites the Little Blue Books as a major source of his own early reading in his autobiography, Education of a Wandering Man. Other writers who recall reading the series in their youth include Saul Bellow, Harlan Ellison, Jack Conroy, Ralph Ellison, and Studs Terkel.

“The works covered were frequently classics of Western literature: Goethe and Shakespeare were well represented, as were the works of the Ancient Greeks, and more modern writers like Voltaire, Emile Zola, H. G. Wells.”