Most of our Landmarks books are reader copies only, and are usually less than the marked price. Collectors: please call or email if you're looking for specific editions or dust jackets!
Landmark Books was a children's book series published by Random House from 1950 to 1970, featuring stories of significant people and events in American history written by popular authors at the time (see: American Landmark Books). The series expanded in 1953 to include world history as a sub-series called World Landmark Books, and a second sub-series of larger-format books illustrated with color artwork or black and white photographs was introduced in the 1960s as Landmark Giants, which would continue releasing new titles beyond the end of the main series until 1974. A number titles from the American and World series have been reissued or republished by others in paperback (see: Landmark Reprints) and a few new titles covering topics like civil rights and terrorism were added from the 1980s to the early 2000s (see: Second Series Landmarks).
Volumes in the initial run of the American, World, and Giant series were numbered, and a list of titles was printed on the inside of each book's dust jacket. The series would grow to include 122 American, 63 World, and 25 Giant volumes by noted authors like C. S. Forester, Robert Penn Warren, Pearl S. Buck, Quentin Reynolds, MacKinlay Kantor, Shirley Jackson, Daniel J. Boorstin, and many others.
A blurb printed on the jacket of later entries in the series by Millicent Taylor, former Education Editor for The Christian Science Monitor, described the Landmark Books as being intended for ages ten to fifteen, uniformly under 200 pages, and illustrated with maps and drawings.
David Spear, writing in the American Historical Association's news magazine, says that the series "lured an entire generation of young readers" to the history discipline, "including many of today's professional historians."
"The Landmark Books are a series of non-fiction books published by Random House in the fifties and early sixties. Simply put, the Landmark series is the best collection of children's histories ever written. As a jacket blurb on an old edition stated, the reasons [for the series' popularity] are obvious: good writers and important and appealing subjects from America's past.
There are three main divisions in the Landmark books:
- Books covering American history, usually just called Landmarks.
There are 122 of these, originally published in matching cloth covers with dust jackets until number 103, at which point the series switched to pictorial covers and no dust jackets. The Seabees of World War II is the only book that originally came with both a pictorial cover and a dust jacket. Some of the earlier books in the series were later reprinted with pictorial covers.
- Books covering world history, called World Landmarks.
There are 63 of these. The first 52 have cloth covers and dust jackets. 53-63 only came in pictorial covers.
- Larger books covering wider swaths of history, groups of people, and specific cities/regions, called Landmark Giants.
There are 25 of these. Some of them are numbered, but not all are, so it's hard to tell the "order." Also, these are not consistently labeled as "Landmark Giants."
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