История издательства «Little Golden Books» и его основание.

Firm responsible for publishing the Little Golden Books

the company Western Publishing

Edward Henry Wadewitz, the 30 year old son of German immigrants, worked at the West Side Printing Company in Racine, Wisconsin. When the owner of that company was unable to pay Wadewitz his wages, Wadewitz took the opportunity in 1907 to purchase the company for $2,504, with some of the funds provided by his brother Albert. Knowing that the company needed staff with more knowledge of the business than he had, Wadewitz hired Roy A. Spencer, a printer at the Racine Journal Company. In 1910, the company changed its name to Western Printing and Lithographing Company after the purchase of its first lithographic press. K. K. Publications became defunct during the mid/late 1960s.

During the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, Western introduced new products: The Whitman jigsaw puzzle became very popular during this period as did a new series of books called Big Little Books. Brought out in 1932, the 10 cent Big Little Books became very popular with people looking for inexpensive entertainment. The first Big Little Book was The Adventures of Dick Tracy. Duplaix had the idea to produce a colorful, more durable and affordable children's book than those being published at that time which sold for $2 to $3. With the help of Lucile Ogle, also working at the Guild, Duplaix contacted Albert Leventhal, a vice president and sales manager at Simon & Schuster, and Leon Shimkin, also at Simon & Schuster, with his idea. The group decided to publish twelve titles for simultaneous release in what was to be called the Little Golden Books Series. Each book would have forty two pages, twenty eight printed in two color, and fourteen in four color. The books would be staple bound. The group originally discussed a 50 cent price for the books, but Western did not want to compete with other 50 cent books already on the market. The group calculated that if the print run for each title was 50,000 copies instead of 25,000, the books could be sold for 25 cents each. In September 1942, the first 12 titles were printed and released to stores in October. In addition it was one of the initial investors in the park by virtue of being a part owner of Disneyland, Inc.

Western and Pocket Books, Inc. formed Golden Press, Inc. at the end of 1958 following their joint purchase of all Golden Book properties from Simon and Schuster. The arrangement called for Western to continue to create and manufacture Golden Books which Pocket Books would promote, sell, and distribute. By 1959, over 150 Little Golden Book titles had sold at least a million copies, and more than 400 of the 1,000 plus Golden Book titles were in print in thirteen languages. for $120.8 million in a cash/stock deal. It sold the adult books (Golden Guide) to St. Martin's Press in 1999.

In June 2001, DIC Entertainment announced they would purchase Golden Books Family Entertainment for $170 Million and send them out of bankruptcy. However, DIC would pass off the purchase due to high costs and instead Golden Books Family Entertainment was eventually acquired jointly by Classic Media, owner of the catalog of United Productions of America (UPA) and book publisher Random House in a bankruptcy auction for the $84.4 million on August 16, 2001. In turn, Random House, and Classic Media gained ownership of Golden Books' entertainment catalog (including the family entertainment catalog of Broadway Video which includes the pre 1974 library of Rankin/Bass Productions and the library of Total Television) as well as production, licensing and merchandising rights for Golden Books' characters and the Gold Key Comics and Dell Comics catalogs, while Random House gained Golden Books' book publishing properties. The H. E. Harris stamp and coin company bought Whitman Coin Products from St. Martin's Press in 2003 and renamed it Whitman Publishing. On July 23, 2012, Classic Media was acquired by DreamWorks Animation for $155 million and renamed DreamWorks Classics. On July 1, 2013, Random House merged with the Penguin Group, forming a new company called Penguin Random House. In April 2016, the acquisition of DreamWorks Animation (owner of DreamWorks Classics) by NBCUniversal was announced. Historian Michael Barrier has lamented the apparent loss of Western's business records for future use by researchers.

With licenses for characters from Walt Disney Productions, Warner Bros., Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Walter Lantz Studio, Western produced comics based on these characters, as well as original works. The editorial staff at the West Coast office over the years included: Eleanor Packer, Alice Cobb, Chase Craig, Zetta Devoe, Del Connell and Bill Spicer. Bernie Zuber was an editorial artist, a position similar to that of a production artist, from 1957 until 1982. Oskar Lebeck, Matt Murphy and Wally Green are among those who oversaw the East Coast office. From 1938 to 1962, Western's properties were published under a partnership with Dell Comics, which also handled the distribution and financing of the comic books. In 1962, Western ended this partnership and published comics itself, establishing the imprint Gold Key Comics. As Murphy explained the split:

This imprint continued until the late 1970s, after which newsstand distribution was discontinued in favor of distribution to toy stores under the "Whitman Comics" banner. The company stopped publishing comics in 1984, and all of its licenses have since gone to other publishers. Many of these new licensees have included among their offerings reprints of stories originally published by Western. Prior to 1962, in addition to comics published through Dell, Western published some comics under its own name, particularly giveaways such as March of Comics and the annual kite safety title (which featured an array of licensed characters) published over a span of 32 years for power utility companies. Both series had print runs in the hundreds of thousands. In the 1990s, the Western/Gold Key characters Magnus, Turok and Dr. Solar were licensed to Valiant Comics, who published modified versions of the characters to great success. However, by the mid 1990s, Valiant's sales had slumped due to the decade's speculative boom collapsing, and the company ceased publishing in 1999. In 2004, Dark Horse Comics began reprinting some of Western's original comic book properties, which by then were owned by Random House, along with Tarzan from the Jesse Marsh era. In 2009, the company announced plans to launch new versions of various Gold Key characters, with former Valiant editor in chief Jim Shooter as head writer.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Western published a wide range of children's books (puzzle books, coloring books, Tell a Tale books, Big Little Books), mostly under the Golden Books and Whitman Publishing brand names. The Little Golden Books was a very popular series. Lucille Ogle helped develop the format for these low priced books, which told simple stories and were among the first children's books with full color illustrations. The first was published in 1942. Beginning as the "Whitman Famous Classics", and later renamed the "Golden Press" imprint, Western published a series of (public domain) classics, such as Little Women, Little Men, Black Beauty and Heidi. In the late 1960s, Golden Books were bound in the Goldencraft reinforced library bindings and sold to schools and libraries in the United States by a group of independent sales representatives. The library bound books were very popular with the schools and libraries. Offices were set up in Wayne, New Jersey, and the reinforced library books were warehoused in Wayne and distributed from that location. There were about 80 sales representatives in the United States under the general manager, Roy Spahr.

From the 1940s to the 1980s, Western published several series of books for older children and young teenagers, initially under its Whitman line. Girls' mystery series included Trixie Belden, Ginny Gordon, Donna Parker, Meg Duncan and Trudy Phillips. Boys' series included the Walton Boys, Power Boys, Brains Benton, and Troy Nesbit mysteries. The series, published from the 1950s to the 1970s, also included a number of titles licensed from popular movies and television shows: Lassie, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, many television Westerns, and Walt Disney's Spin and Marty and Annette (from the serial featuring Annette Funicello that aired on The Mickey Mouse Club. The company was also the original American publisher of The Adventures of Tintin, issuing six titles in English translation in 1959 and 1960, before discontinuing further releases because of what were considered disappointing sales.

In 1937, Western, at the request of Kay Kamen (who oversaw licensing and marketing at Disney), assumed production of the newsstand version of Mickey Mouse Magazine, which, in October 1940, was succeeded by the comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. 1936 1954 Story Parade, Inc. (a Western subsidiary) published Story Parade: A Magazine for Boys and Girls with a children's literature orientation. Then in late 1955, Western initiated Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club Magazine with content produced by Disney Studio staff members. It was intended to promote The Mickey Mouse Club television series. Eventually the name was changed to Walt Disney's Magazine and the focus shifted to contemporary Disney movie and television productions. In a similar vein, they printed Gulf Oil's Wonderful World of Disney premium (1969 1970) which was edited by Disney's George Sherman. During the 1960s, Western published The Golden Magazine for Boys and Girls with Cracky the Parrot as its mascot.

For many years Golden Press was publisher of Betty Crocker cookbooks. Often these were issued in a three ring binder format so recipe pages could be removed for easy consultation while cooking. Western produced games such as Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary until Hasbro bought that division in 1994. The company published the children's science books The World of Science and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, while the Golden Guide nature guides were published with the Golden Press name. Silence isn't Golden. Reading to your child is. (1997)