About Vintage Greenleaf Classics Books
The Greenleaf Classics Book Collection
The vintage Greenleaf Classics books that are featured on this web site were collected by Lance Casebeer and Bob Speray, starting in 1984. At that time, there was no information within the West Coast vintage paperback collecting hobby about the books.
Over the past 30 years, the collection has been built up to be an almost complete archive, holding one copy of each title published by the Hamling organization across all the imprints. The existence of the collection and research based on it has increased our knowledge about the publisher, the books, the actual authors and the artists who produced the cover art.
See the longer History of the Greenleaf Classics Book Collection for more details about the process and the people who helped.
The Digital Archive
Since 2002, Bruce Brenner (web site Vintage Paperback Books & Digests) has been maintaining a collectors' checklist of all the known vintage Greenleaf Classics books. The checklist has matured and improved over the years to the point where it now tracks the real author of the book, not just the byline, and has cover artist attribution and extensive notes about the books.
Bruce has also produced archive quality digital scans of each book in the collection. Many are touched up to show them as they were new.
Through these amazing glamour photos, the books can be seen as the stars they are: lost cultural artifacts worth another look.
All book cover images used on this web site come from Bruce's copyrighted photos, and are used by permission.
The Web Site
This web site reflects the most complete and correct information currently available about the vintage paperback books published by Greenleaf Classics Publishing from 1959 through 1975. It showcases this unique set of books using modern curation techniques to give the books full respect as a cultural heritage.
Bob Speray created this site, as the culmination of his many years collecting vintage Greenleaf Classics books.
The web site provides authoritative bibliographic information about each book and shows a clear image of the book's cover. Books can be browsed by way of hyper-links tying together related books. The search feature allows for finding books without having to page through them all.
While visiting this web site, expect to see the secret heart of late 20th century American culture in ways that no other archive can show.
The Goal
The goal of the site is to fully document and illustrate all the books published by Greenleaf Classics. This vintage section will focus on the early books published from 1959 through 1975.
Your comments, and your help to fill in gaps in the data set, and your corrections of any errors are always welcome. Contact us.