The Golden Guides, originally Golden Nature Guides, are a series of pocket-sized books that were created by Western Publishing and published under their "Golden Press" line, primarily a children's book imprint, beginning in 1949. Intended for primary and secondary school level readers, the series began as field guides with such titles as Birds (1949), Flowers (1950), and Mammals (1955), and then expanded to a wider range of subjects, not intended as identification guides.