Hard to believe, but that wildly popular series of children’s books – the Little Golden Books – has been around for 67 years.

The aims of Georges Duplaix, head of the Artists and Writers Guild, Dr. Mary Reed of Columbia University’s Teachers College, and the executives at Simon & Schuster way back in 1942 were to create uplifting stories for kids – stories that would teach – and get them into parents’ hands cheap. They also said the covers and pages had better be darn durable because little kids are hard on books.

At the time, you could buy a children’s book for $2 to $3. The minimum wage then was 30 cents an hour, so there went most of a day and a half’s pay for a book for your kids. It isn’t any mystery why most parents didn’t buy books for their children.

The target of the planners was to bring out books that would sell for a quarter – less than an hour’s pay.

And they hit the target. And they used excellent writers and illustrators to make sure those books were the best they could be.

Here are the first 12 Little Golden Books issued, all on October 1 of 1942: Three Little Kittens, Bedtime Stories, Mother Goose, Prayers for Children, The Little Red Hen – I remember that one well – Nursery Songs, The Alphabet from A to Z, The Poky Little Puppy – a favorite that my wife read often to her children – The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, Baby’s Book of Objects, The Animals of Farmer Jones, and This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes.

Sales took off like the proverbial rocket, a million and a half copies out there in five months.

Eleven years into the project, 300 million books sold.

By 1986, a billion books.

By 2002, 2 billion books – enough to reach the moon.

Little Golden Books is now past the 3 billion mark . . . even though the average price of a book is a tad more than $3.

The imprint now has more than 1,200 titles out there. Twelve hundred stories.

And the most popular? The Little Red Hen, followed by Richard Scarry’s Good Night Little Bear, Animal Orchestra, The Lion’s Paw, The Fire Engine Book, and The Good Humor Man.

What’s your favorite?