The Little Book That Could Celebrates the Big Five-Oh

NEW YORK —  How time flies: Gertrude turned 50 this year.

Gertrude, the plump little kangaroo who reads, is the symbol of Pocket Books.

She was created in 1939 by artist Frank J. Lieberman when it was noted the new paperback book line had no colophon. Lieberman drew a bespectacled kangaroo reading a book, with another book waiting to be read in her pouch.

Lieberman, who was paid $25 for his drawing, said he named Gertrude after his mother-in-law. The kangaroo has changed now and again since first drawn, but currently is much like the original--minus the reading glasses.

Over the years, the reading ‘roo has appeared on more than a billion copies of Pocket Books. The brainchild of Robert F. de Graff, the first Pocket Books appeared in 1939, near the end of the Depression and the beginning of World War II.

Making Them Affordable

De Graff wanted to bring books to the many who could not afford the $2 to $3 needed to buy a hard cover version.

The first 10 of the soft covers were priced at 25 cents a copy. They were an odd mixture: “Lost Horizon” by James Hilton and “Five Great Tragedies” by William Shakespeare; “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder and “Bambi” by Felix Salten.

Rather than sending them only to bookstores for sale, the traditional way of doing things, De Graff shipped them to a variety of outlets--drugstores, department stores, newsstands. Sales that first year hit 1.5 million copies. By 1943, sales were 33 million.

Of the more than 1 billion books the firm says it has printed since its founding 50 years ago, the star of the show is “Baby and Child Care” by Dr. Benjamin Spock, with more than 30 million copies in print.