Summer Book Club Report for Tacoma Public Library - Golden Legacy by Leonard Marcus

In Golden Legacy Leonard Marcus acknowledges Steve Santi.  In Steve Santi's Warman's Little Golden Books: Identification and Price Guide, Santi shows a thumbnail picture of all the Little Golden Book covers, in categories and with other details. Collectors prices include a guide to how the price varies with an individual book's condition. 

An early Santi feature is a brief history, and in Leonard Marcus' narrative, seven chapters with inserted material, brief histories are followed by detailed facts and character development.  This depth both compares and contrasts with the illustrations, many are the lavish yet simple color material from Little Golden Books. 

Previous storage for Golden Books
 became battered and was replaced

Little Golden Book stories were short.  Individuals who strategized for a vocabulary and sentence pattern that would contribute to language development are part of the Golden Legacy story. 

Little Golden Book publications found no support from the criticism of libraries.  Among efforts 25¢ Little Golden Books made were notes smuggled on the hotel meal tray into an illustrator's room during the ALA Meeting in New York.  Little Golden Books were sold to parents in variety and drug stores and grocery stores.

 

For me it was special to come across an illlustration of a loved Golden Book once again.  "Here Comes The Parade."  Not all the Golden Books we had were in the box left by my mother and father.

Little Golden Book publishers, printers, writers and artists are biographied:  "Malvern gave their soignée mothers the look of women with places to go and things to do quite apart from raising their children." (of Corinne Malvern, illustrator of Dr. Dan, the Bandaid Man) 

One illustration, a letter from early Golden's Western Publishing Company to Walt Disney, deepens my appreciation for a standard situation of humor:  the office window view of an immense factory where smoke billows from chimneys. This laughter at scale, arising from people, is a part of the first interaction between Western Publishing and Walt Disney.    On Western's stationery is an illustration of their "Plant 2" - this industrail building sprawls like a cartoon.  In fact, their plant building was large enough to inspire humor. I remember this when I read that Little Golden Books later owned its own private jet with a picture of the Poky Little Puppy on its side.