The Press: Little Blue Books

One winter's day in Philadelphia 56 years ago, 15-year-old Emanuel Julius invested a dime in a paperback edition of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was, as it turned out, the wisest investment of his life. As Julius recalls in The World of Haldeman-Julius, an anthology of his writings published last week (Twayne Publishers of New York; 288 pp.; $4). Wilde's poem did something to him. "Never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt hard as glass....