To: UI Special Collections
To: Smith Collection homepage
To: 20th Century U. S. Imprints in the Smith Collection

The portion of this website in front of you brings together in preliminary fashion a variety of lists and descriptions for United States Miniature Books published during the Twentieth Century. This page describes titles held by the University of Iowa Libraries for the press or publisher described below.

A question about the Little Leather Library was posed on the SHARP-L listserv in April 2005. It yielded the following responses and references:

Gordon B. Neavill, Wayne State University , wrote: "I posted the following message about the Little Leather Library on Ex-Libris in 1995: 'The Little Leather Library was founded around 1915 and sold millions of volumes before ceasing operations in 1923. It was a significant example of mass-marketing. Initially the books were sold through Woolworth's, then by mail order. You could buy 30 of the little volumes boxed for $2.98, C.O.D.
'The series was conceived by Albert Boni, who sold his interest and then went on to start the Modern Library. His partners in the venture, Harry Scherman and Max Sackheim, used what they learned about mail-order selling of books to start the Book-of-the-Month Club. Woolworth's sold a million copies a year, and 35-40 million volumes were sold by mail. They aren't too hard to find and aren't worth very much--a couple of dollars a volume would be about right. A boxed set of 30 volumes might sell from $50 to $100. A historically significant venture in publishing, and so successful in its brief heyday that the books have little value today.'

Joan Rubin, The University of Rochester, wrote: "This is the Little Leather Library, a series of miniature editions of classics that Charles and Albert Boni and the admen Maxwell Sackheim and Harry Scherman (later the founder of the Book-of-the-Month CLub) founded in 1916. Scherman convinced Whitman's Chocolates to include a volume in each candy box. Later Woolworth's sold them at ten cents apiece. The story is that they switched to synthetic bindings as leather prices rose but the new bindings made the books smell bad in hot weather. By 1920 the Little Leather Library had marketed over twenty-five million volumes, many of them by mail."

Solveig Robinson, Pacific Lutheran University wrote: "The Little Leather Library was founded by Charles and Albert Boni (proprietors of the Washington Square Bookshop) and Harry Scherman (best known as the founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club) in 1916 or so. The line included 60-plus titles, all in the public domain, and after early efforts to sell them through Woolworth's, they were successfully marketed through direct mail. A 30-volume set cost $2.98 in 1920."
" For more details, see chapter 5 of Janice Radway's A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1977)."

Jonathan Rose, Drew University , added: "There's also some discussion of the Little Leather Library in Rebecca Rego Barry, 'The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the Great Books in the United States in the 1990s', Book History 6 (2003): 251-275."

Patrick Buckridge, Griffith University ( Australia ), wrote: "The Little Leather Library is also discussed by Joan Shelley Rubin in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1992)."

Cecile Cottenet, Universite de Provence ( France ), wrote: "There are a few lines on the Little Leather Library in Tom Dardis, Firebrand, the Life of Horace Liveright (1995), pp 46-49. Apparently the collection influenced the creation of Boni & Liveright's Modern Library."

Little Leather Library Corporation
New York

All copies are 4" x 3". Bound in limp leather and cover blindstamped. This group is the gift of Carol Kapell in memory of Pauline B. Deems.

Robert Browning. Poems. 154pp.
Alfred Lord Tennyson. Idylls of he King. 128pp.

For a 58 volume set, circa 1920, fully cataloged in InfoHawk, see "Little Leather Library. The Redcroft Edition".

&