April 16:
On this day in 1926, the Book-of-the-Month Club mailed out its first monthly
selection—the novel Lolly Willowes,
by British author Sylvia Townsend Warner. The BOMC was the bright idea of Harry
Scherman, an advertising copywriter who had already mail-order marketed his
Little Leather Library—"30 Great Books For $2.98" + a box of
chocolates. Capitalizing on the middlebrow reader's guilt and aspirations, the
new venture was an instant and influential success: from 5,000 to 50,000
subscribers in the first year, half-a-million subscribers twenty years later.
Still, the BOMC had a
shaky start. While Lolly Willowes was
a bestseller in Britain, many subscribers sent it back, and by early 1927, the
company with 40,000 subscribers now, the monthly selection sometimes came back
as fast as it went out. "The country didn't want The Heart of Emerson's Journals," Scherman recalled, "they
didn't want any part of Emerson's Journals."
This caused a cash flow crisis, and inspired the famous "negative option"
that gave subscribers a right of refusal based upon the timely return of their
reply card.
Predicting subscriber
interest was risky business for a variety of reasons, not all of them literary.
In A Feeling for Books: The
Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire, Janice
Radway quotes from the advice given to all reader-decorators in a 1920s article
in House Beautiful magazine, this
titled "Books for the Home: A Selection for Both Merit and Color":
Blue pottery vases and
bowls for flowers are most attractive, and certain blue books, placed not too
far away, will repeat and emphasize color. Among the lighter blues are Beebe's Jungle Peace and W. H. Judson's Away and Long Ago…. With the darker
blues are two of the most famous and desirable books in the world, Shakespeare
in the Cambridge edition, and the Oxford
Book of Verse. …If you would have a tranquil bedside bookstand in your
guestroom, put there David Grayson's Adventures
in Contentment, those neutral-tinted volumes, The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Messr Marco Polo and the little tan poetry of Christopher Morley,
topping these off with a mottled pink and blue in the form of The Monk and the Dancer and The Turquoise Cup, by Arthur Cosslett
Smith.
Radway says that a similar
aesthetic "was installed at the heart of the Book-of-the-Month Club
operation."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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