Good As Gold

Remember the Poky Little Puppy? There's something about the slow-moving puppy's quandary that seems to appeal to everyone who read the Little Golden Books as a child. We've all been there: late to some event and scolded by our mothers for it. The story has a near-universal appeal that seems not to have abated since the book was first published in 1942--first by Simon & Schuster and now by Random House, which is also the publisher of Leonard S. Marcus's appealing history, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way.

Indeed, from renowned authors to ordinary readers, few have harsh words for The Poky Little Puppy. "In the book it's the puppy's curiosity that makes him 'poky,'" says the Newbury Medal-winning children's-book author and illustrator Avi, whom Marcus quotes in the book. "He's curious about simple, basic things. It's so elemental…. For me as a child, my sense of identification with the character was simply based on the fact that I was late all the time." Aside from being a perennial favorite, though, The Poky Little Puppy is also a publishing juggernaut that led the postwar sales revolution in children's publishing that continues today.

Written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, The Poky Little Puppy was just one of 12 original books that launched the series and its publisher, Simon & Schuster's Golden Press, into the children's book market. Little Golden Books debuted on October 1, 1942, at a time when most children's books were beyond the budget of the average working family. Simon & Schuster priced the Golden Books at an affordable quarter each, and printed them in glorious full color to boot.

The success of the handy, inexpensive series was hardly a given, though. At the time, the effort was widely criticized by literary and cultural gatekeepers. As Marcus writes, "In the 1940s, many of the field's most respected critics were librarians, and public libraries constituted the lion's share of the market for children's books published by older houses such as Scribner, Houghton Mifflin, and Harper."

But the marketers at Simon & Schuster decided to forgo then-standard publishing practices, bypass the bookstores and libraries, and place the attractive books in drugstores and grocery stores, directly before their intended purchasers. The scheme worked beyond anyone's expectations, much to critics' chagrin. "Perhaps, more than anything," says Marcus, "what it showed was the extent to which Golden's success had thrown the established system for publishing and disseminating children's books into a defensive mode."

Of course, the best part of the Golden Books story is the high quality of illustration that was present in the books from the beginning. Golden Legacy also gives ample space to the illustrators who were given their big break in the burgeoning postwar children's-literature market through the series, most notably Richard Scarry, one of the many Golden artists whose styles were to become instantly recognizable.

Perhaps the most interesting group of illustrators Marcus covers appears in chapters two and three, "Entrepreneurs and Ð"‰migrÐ"© Artists" and "'Books and Bread.'" Here, readers will find such luminaries as Feodor Rojankovsky, Tenggren, Alice and Martin Provensen, Garth Williams, Leonard Weisgard, Eloise Wilkin, J. P. Miller, Mary Blair, and the great Tibor Gergely (Scurfy the Tugboat, Tootle, Five Little Firemen, The Taxi That Hurried).

Two of the first 12 Little Golden Books were illustrated by Tenggren, a Swedish emigrÐ"© and noted children's book artist even before he arrived in the United States in early 1920 and settled in the Cleveland area. By 1922, Tenggren had set up shop in New York City and had a thriving business illustrating advertisements for Madison Avenue agencies and magazine articles, as well as nearly two dozen children's books. In