The most obvious one was the price - they cost just 25 cents. There were a lot of reasons that Golden Books became an instant success when they were first published.

Those beloved books celebrate their 75th birthday this year.įirst introduced shortly after the start of World War II, many of them - such as The Tawny Scrawny Lion, The Saggy Baggy Elephant and The Poky Little Puppy - have become classics. With their golden spines and brightly colored pictures, they begged to be grabbed off a shelf by a curious child - which is exactly what their creators intended. In the 1950s and '60s, if there were any children's books in a house, at least one of them was likely to be a Little Golden Book.