Whitman "Penny Books"

The Whitman Publishing Company (Racine, Wisconsin), has long published children's books in several formats, but in my opinion, none is so interesting as these.

They don't actually call themselves "Penny Books," but a few have a 1¢ price on the cover, and that's the moniker given to them by today's collectors. All (that I have seen) were published in 1938, and the inside front cover lists the same 33 titles in the series. The inside back covers have the same ads for 10¢ "magazines": Crakajack Funnies and Super Comics, which were both early comic books that reprinted newspaper strips.

The books were very small (about 2½ by 3½ inches), and its possible that they might have been giveaways with other products, which would account for the lack of a price on many of them.

They were illustrated, though the number of pictures in a book varied greatly. The illustrations were B&W full-page cartoons, and are reminiscent of those in Big Little Books.

I believe the characters in these books all come from the pages of newspaper comic strips.

If anyone has further information, please contact me.

Whitman is still around today. Besides several offerings for juveniles, they publish books for numismatists (collectors of money). Besides collectors' reference books, they produce the folding coin holders that are familiar to many of us.