The Little Leather Library refers to originally leather-bound, miniature editions of classic books printed by the Little Leather Library Corporation between 1916 and the early 1920s. Free editions of Shakespearian plays included in tobacco purchases from a cigarette company inspired brothers Charles and Albert Boni to devise their own prototype of a miniature Romeo and Juliet. The brothers pitched these books in miniature to businessmen Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim of J. Walter Thompson Company. Through inventive marketing, such as by including copies of the Little Leather Library in Whitman’s chocolate boxes and by branding them as gifts for American soldiers oversees, the project was a massive success, selling millions of copies over the next four years. However, direct mail orders beginning in the 1920s signaled the waning of their popularity, as the Boni brothers began to realize the American market for their books was saturating. Robert K. Haas bought out the Little Leather Library Company is 1922, renaming the company to the Little Luxart Company (but owned by Robert K. Haas, Inc.), probably because the original leather bindings had been replaced during soaring war-time leather prices by synthetic and faux materials.
The 30 Volume Set (1921)
The following is a list of the 30 volume boxed set advertised in 1921. This “redcroft” leather set could be mail-ordered for $2.98.
- Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant
- Courtship of Miles Standish, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Dreams, Olive Schreiner
- Emerson’s Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The Rubiyat of Omar Khayham, Edward FitzGerald
- Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay
- Bab Ballads
- Enoch Arden, Alfred Tennyson
- The Coming of Arthur, Alfred Tennyson
- The Gold Bug, Edgar Allan Poe
- Will O’ The Mill, Robert Louis Stevenson
- A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
- Salome, Oscar Wilde
- The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde
- Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde
- Fifty Best Poems of America
- Fifty Best Poems of England
- Poems, Robert Burns
- Poems, Robert Browning
- Barrack Room Ballads, Rudyard Kipling
- Lincoln’s Speeches and Addresses
- Washington’s Speeches and Letters
- The Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Friendship and Other Essays, Henry Thoreau
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
- The Tempest, William Shakespeare
- Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond
- Man Without a Country, Edward Everett Hale
- Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
More information on the Little Leather Library Corporation and books can be found here and here.