Little Blue Books—compact, cheap, often carrying alluring titles or topics—became immensely successful in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Because they cost only a nickel apiece, the books represented the true reading taste of Americans, according to their publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), who referred to the thousands of titles he published in a small town in southeastern Kansas as "a university in print" and a "democracy of literature." Many of his best-selling books promised frank discussions of sex for an American public that was still deemed bashful about the question. But the chapbooks also gave thrifty readers a broad range of literature at practically no cost: ancient and modern works, essays, fiction, philosophy, humor, biography, self-improvement manuals, and a variety of other works.

Haldeman-Julius, son of a Russian Jewish immigrant bookbinder in Philadelphia, worked at Socialist newspapers in New York...