Publisher:Wonder Books

Wonder Books began publishing in 1946 (or possibly slightly before then). They were originally owned by Random House. In 1949, they began using Curtis Publishing Company for their distribution services. In 1953, Wonder Books was acquired by a joint venture company comprised of Curtis and Grosset & Dunlap. (Hence some early Wonder Books are reprints of Grosset & Dunlap titles, and were published with those earlier copyright dates.) They published books up until 1977, when Curtis Publishing shut down and its assets were sold to Kent State University. In 1981, Curtis Management Group was founded to "license publicity rights", and apparently to license remaining copyrights. Reprints were published, especially by Price/Stern/Sloan, until 1986.

Wonder Books focused on young readers, and published several series at various early reader levels. These series include "Wonder Books", "How and Why Wonder Books", "Little Wonder Books", "Wonder Book Easy Reader", "Wonder Starters", "Young Readers Wonder Books", "To Read Aloud", and possibly others. The only series with very many books of interest to us is the primary "Wonder Books" series. This series began with #501, and the last book published was #896, although the penultimate book in the series appears to be #871. At this time there does not seem to be a good list online of the books in this series so, for the possible convenience of other children's book fans, we include the full list (so far as we know it) here. This complete list is also useful for identifying the likely print dates of various editions. These books often show only the copyright dates, so for later printings (as revealed by the list of available books in most of these books) and for reprint editions (with a change in the book number), the copyright dates on the other books in the series are necessary to determine actual printing dates. We have been unable to locate any data for Wonder Books 503, 658, 670, 671, 801, 806, 809, 813, 814, 856, 861, 863, 864, and 870. Some of these, especially the later numbers, may have been planned and never published.

The list of known books, with earliest copyright dates and reprintings listed (when known) is shown below. Books that might be speculative fiction, and hence might have reason to be included in this database, are shown with a * before the number. Those books that are currently included in the database are shown with a **.