Book Clubs

BOOK CLUBS

A Book a Month

Mass-media and mass-marketing stimulated each other during the 1920s. The most successful publishing development was distribution through book clubs. At the start of the decade most Americans did not have access to bookstores. Many potential members of the emerging reading public did not know what to read or how to obtain books. The founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) by Robert K. Haas and Harry Scherman filled a well-defined need.

Judges

The monthly selections were chosen by a panel of judges—critic Henry Seidel Canby, columnist Heywood Broun, author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, man-of-letters Christopher Morley, and newspaper publisher William Allen White—who exercised complete freedom to pick any current book that was not priced more than three dollars. The first selection, distributed in April 1926, established the integrity of the judges: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes: or, the Loving Huntsman, an English feminist fantasy that was hardly a crowd pleaser, went to 4,750 members. Subsequent 1926 selections positioned the BOMC as upper middlebrow. In certain social groups membership in the BOMC was regarded as a badge of intelligence; in others, of pretentiousness; in still others, of intellectual conformity.

Literary Guild

The BOMC prospered, rapidly. By the end of its first season there were 46,539 members. Inevitably the BOMC spawned imitators and competitors, of which the most successful was the Literary Guild of America, launched in 1927. The first Guild selection was Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord, by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech. At first booksellers and some publishers opposed the BOMC. Although the club took away bookstore customers, it also brought in new buyers who wanted a book because it was the BOMC selection. Publishers initially resisted making the price discounts required by the club. Nonetheless, it was clear that the BOMC—and its progeny—put books in the hands of readers who otherwise would not have known about them or purchased them. Both the BOMC and the Literary Guild began on a subscription basis. Members paid an annual fee for twelve books. The negative-option system that allowed members to decline selections was a later improvement. Guild members received special inexpensive editions (twelve books for eighteen dollars), whereas the BOMC distributed copies of the trade edition. The Guild also began with a panel of judges, which was dropped.

Specialization

The next movement in the book-club industry was from general to specialized selections. The hundred-odd American book clubs that eventually emerged were aimed at professions (lawyers), hobbyists (gardeners), and particular fields (history). Their impact on American readers has been prodigious and salutary.

THE 1926 BOMC SELECTIONS

Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Teeftallow, by T. S. Stribling

O Genteel Lady!, by Esther Forbes

The Saga of Billy the Kid, by Walter Noble Burns (nonfiction)

The Silver Spoon, by John Galsworthy

Show Boat, by Edna Ferber

The Time of Man, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The Romantic Comedians, by Ellen Glasgow

The Orphan Angel, by Elinor Wylie

Sources:

The Book of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986);

Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958).