Mr. and Mrs. Julius Haldeman 

Emmanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1889. He joined the American Socialist movement while still in his teens, and by his early twenties was working as a journalist for International Socialist Review, The Call, The Leader, and Chicago World. After moving to Kansas in 1915, he was hired at "The Appeal To Reason", a prestigious Socialist newspaper. In 1916, Emmanuel Julius married Anne Marcet Haldeman. It was Marcet's aunt, Jane Addams, that suggested the two use the name "Haldeman-Julius."

In 1919, with a loan from his wife, Emmanuel bought the newspaper and began to publish the Little Blue books, the first mass-produced paperbacks. The first books published were titled the Appeals Pocket Series and the People's Pocket Series. Inexpensive, they helped bring literature to the masses of people who could not afford the hard-cover books that were being printed at the time. Haldeman-Julius reprinted classics in the beginning - Plato, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Hugo – selling them through ads in newspapers and magazines. Haldeman-Julius then moved to how-to books and finally to education: Chemistry Self-Taught, Italian Self-Taught, and Sociology Self-Taught among them.

The husband and wife team wrote two best-sellers: Dust (1921), a book about farm life in Kansas, and Violence! (1929). They legally separated in 1934, and Marcet died of cancer in 1941. Emmanuel married again, but misfortune continued; he was tried and convicted of tax evasion and in 1951 drowned in his swimming pool. Suspicion surrounded the death, as Emmanuel was terrified of water. The warehouse and printing building burned to the ground in 1978 – on Independence Day.