The Book‐of‐the‐Month Club

The Book‐of‐the‐Month Club, founded in 1926 by the advertising executive Harry Scherman and two partners, sells recently published books by mail to subscribers who contract to purchase its monthly recommendations or alternate selections.In 1927, the club pioneered the marketing technique known as the “negative option,” automatically shipping goods unless customers instructed them not to. To determine its offerings, the club employed a board of well‐known literary figures, including Henry Seidel Canby, William Allen White, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and, after 1944, Clifton Fadiman. Initially, subscribers bought at least four books a year at full price plus postage; subsequently, the club introduced discounts, free “book‐dividends,” and its own editions. By 1945, it had 768,000 members. Typical “books‐of‐the‐month” prior to World War II included Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and James Truslow Adams's The Epic of America. A host of other book‐marketing ventures following the same formula soon arose, beginning with the Literary Guild (1927), many catering to special reading interests such as religion, history, mysteries, or science fiction.

The club's initial practices remained essentially intact until 1977, when Time, Inc. (later Time Warner) acquired the company. After 1988 (with membership around three million), management gradually eliminated the judges, centralized operations, and shifted book selection from its editorial to its marketing staff.

In cultural terms, the organization before 1950 appealed to Americans anxious to cultivate both refinement and the personality necessary for social success. Assailed by critics as a “middlebrow” enterprise that vulgarized art, the club might better be understood as the product of mediations between competing values of social performance and the cultivation of autonomy, as well as among authors, publishers, and audiences. At the end of the twentieth century, its aesthetic system generally favored “serious” fiction that promised to help middle‐class readers gain power over their lives.
See also Literature: Since World War I; Mass Marketing; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Joan Shelley Rubin , The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 1992.
Janice A. Radway , Reading with the Book‐of‐the‐Month Club, 1997.

Joan Shelley Rubin