How the Book-of-the-Month Club Began

Books and Men

ByHENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1

LECTURING, teaching, and study all tend to become institutionalized and stereotyped, especially in mass education. There never are enough born lecturers, born teachers, and born students to make general education work without some kind of standardization. But this is not true of good reading, for good reading is a highly personal experience, the quality of which depends upon the taste, the intellect, the imagination, and the sensitivity of the individual reader.

Still, the reader has to get the books. I find too little in histories of literature and criticism, of how books get to the reader. It is easy to forget that until the nineteenth century the general reader, who is quite as important in the history of civilization as the scholar or creative writer, had little or no access to libraries, and that as late as the early decades of that century the price of books was measured in guineas, not shillings.

As I look back on my own reading history, I see that I grew up in what, if a literary name is to be given to it, must be called the age of the magazine. From the later years of the nineteenth century onward, the price of new books, which had been heavily reduced, went up steadily until the cost more than doubled. In this same period the price of magazines went down. And it was not until the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt that in this country the cost of mailing a book was brought into reasonable proportion with the expense of sending magazines by post. As late as the 1920’s, there were thousands of sizable communities in the United States where the only books that could be purchased were light romances or detective stories at the local drugstore.

I used to feel very strongly, when we were getting ihe Literary Review going, and trying to distribute the Saturday Review throughout the country, that there was too much shadow-boxing in our job. Most of our clientele wanted to see books, to leaf them a bit, before they purchased; and that was very difficult outside the big cities. I used to relieve my mind by writing editorials about the price of books, but they never told how to make books more accessible, because I was neither a manufacturer nor a distributor, and did not know. I even spent a year or so looking for some young industrialist with a million dollars, who might enter the conservative and custom-bound publishing trade and show how the thing could be done, even if he spent his million before it began to pay. I did not find him.

It was not until we had more efficient manufacturing processes and a great war in which millions of soldiers wanted books to take their minds off tedium and danger, that the problem of cheap books (though not cheap new books) was solved. The question of how to make good new books accessible was tackled much earlier, and I was lucky enough to be one of the agents, if in no sense the inventor, of the solution.

It was in 1926, when the Saturday Review was well launched, that I was asked by Robert Haas, later a member of the firm of Random House, publishers, to be chairman of the Board of Judges of a new enterprise to be called the Book-of-theMonth Chib. The prime director of the enterprise, Mr. Harry Scherman, had come from a long American experience in distributing classics in cheap form, and had seen that his mail-order technique could be used for new books on a far broader basis than some timid experiments which had been tried in Germany.

The Book-of-the-Month Club was small and experimental at first. I do not believe that we went beyond 40,000 subscribers in our first year, and when we judges chose for our first book the very literary and specialized Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, I am sure that the proprietors thought they would lose their subscribers and their collective shirts. They did not — and to the judges the chance to use what judgment they possessed, and what standards they lived by, in the actual distribution as well as in the criticism of books, became a challenge as well as an opportunity. For myself, as an editor I had been leading horses to water, and now I could help to see that they had something to drink. We thought that we might be able to create a new kind of audience for good reading, and we did.

William Lyon Phelps was asked to join our committee but refused for a good and characteristic reason. Me had an audience already and preferred to be his own committee. So we began with myself; the wise and kindly William Allen White, who knew his Middle West as well as the books he advised us to send them; the generous and saltyminded Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a novelist, herself and a warm and utterly honest critic; lumbering Heywood Broun, with his wide experience in variegated journalism and a personality of unusual influence; and the ample Christopher Morley, wellread and a source of enthusiasms.

2

IN ALL my experience as a teacher, a writer, a critic, and an editor, I have never had so satisfactory a sense of accomplishment in what our ancestors would have called the furtherance of good literature as in my more than twenty years on the Book-ofthe-Month Club. I could have got more academic prestige, perhaps more intellectual prestige, if I had given all my time to a professorship or to the editing of a literary journal obviously not run to make money; but the conviction of superior longterm usefulness on the Book-of-the-Month Club remains. We judges were on salary, and had no ownership in the business as such, and from the beginning were never subjected to an ounce of pressure from the management in making our decisions, so that our devotion to our work was no more sullied by commercialism than a professor’s in a good university. We benefited as a professor benefits when endowment and fees increase, so much and no more.

Fortunately for me, the work of reading and judging fitted in like the teeth of a wheel with my other activities. Intensive reading such as we had to do was an ideal job for a writer or an editor, since the reading could be fitted into any time or place, from trains to backwoods cabins, leaving the time for routine executive work or creative writing free of interruption. At the beginning I felt that the flow of an endless river of print through the mind might debilitate the intellectual faculties. But I soon grew humbler and wiser. My reading supplied data for criticism, and was helpful in enlarging the background necessary for the writing of biographies on which I was soon to embark. I ate my peck of dirt weekly or daily, and found more vitamins than clay in it.

However, reading in earlier and foreign literatures, which had been a passion with me, became a luxury for which I too seldom had time. Whoever thinks that reading new books under pressure is a brief and easy way to earn a living must think again. In a fine book every sentence becomes a responsibility. In a “just maybe” book, an intensity of concentration is necessary unless one is to waste hours of time or to judge erroneously. In an indifferent book, especially a novel, equal concentration is required, for at any moment it may turn upward. Poor books, like bad eggs, lake, care of themselves. I was not supposed to get them but often did, and could take a holiday after the first few chapters. I apologize for giving these personal reactions, which, however, have some relevance to the obscure history of the habits and the technique of reading.

We have learned some very important facts about the reading taste and reading capacity of this country in our twenty-odd years with the Book-of-the-Month Club. In all that time there have been only seven judges — the places of the two who died, Heywood Broun and William Allen White, having been filled by John P. Marquand and Clifton Fadiman. So there has been opportunity to pool experience and conclusions. The teacher of literature seldom knows how effective (or ineffective) his teaching has been until years have matured his students and settled their patterns of life. We could test our success and failures in a few months — not, let me hasten to add, by the sales figures of the books we sent out. These were instructive but might often mean only that we had hit upon some unexpected quirk of public taste, good for that time only, or had failed in describing the book to induce our readers to take it. Gone with the Wind did not sell well for us when we sent it out. Many subscribers, as they had a right to, chose another book. It was one of the most confident choices of our Board; yet our first reaction was that, as several times before, we had been too confident of a popular choice. Now it has gone into more than ten millions.

What, counted for success in our eyes was the impression made upon critics and readers, the impact of the book, which was easy enough to register. A strong impact meant, usually, long-continued sales. It meant, in certain instances, the deep satisfaction of a successful venture. This happened when we chose a type of book hitherto not widely successful with the American public, such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, or Clarence Day’s Life with Father, or George Santayana’s only novel. The Last Puritan, and saw it spread through the best readers in the country.

It took us a long while - too - long to learn a very simple truth. We could not choose a book on the basis of what we thought the public liked and wanted. We did not know. The publishers did not know, as was proved by their frequent (and expensive) attempts to make best-sellers by advertising, and their equally common surprise when some Cinderella on their list married the prince of popularity.

I should make some qualifications. There is a standardized type of light romance that the people will always take as they will take breakfast food or sugar. Occasionally a masterpiece or near masterpiece conforms to this type — a Treasure Island, for example — and will sell as well as the synthetic product intended to appeal to the simpler emotions (including the sexual). When minor masterpieces came our way, we snapped them up; but the standardized variety did not appeal to us and so did not tempt us to play down to what we knew to be a popular taste. Yet sometimes in the earlier years we would take, in a lean month, a “just pretty good” book, fiction or non-fiction, because we all agreed that this was what the general reader, if not our superior selves, wanted. Such choices often failed, and never succeeded with any emphasis whatever.

We began to see that there was only one safe procedure, which was to choose what we ourselves liked. If we liked a book well enough, the public seemed to like it also. The only qualification was common sense. There were books upon which we, as highly experienced readers, might agree, which were obviously too erudite, too esoteric, too specialized, or, as in much modern poetry, too difficult for the intelligent general reader. Yet it proved to be less dangerous to err in this direction than in the choice of the commonplace.

3

IN ORDER to free the interplay of like and dislike among five very different personalities, we quickly gave up voting, which always favored everyone’s second choice, and adopted the Quaker principle of concurrence. The old Quakers in their business meetings never voted. If the majority could not persuade the minority to concur, the proposal was dropped. The proponents bared their hearts. The opponents searched theirs. With us, very frequently, the length and vitality of the discussion itself would prove that the book had more vitality than was suspected even by those who favored it.

The minority, however, were not asked to subscribe to the high estimate of the majority; they were asked to concur in the decision to send out the book. If they would not, we dropped it, and its subsequent history usually showed that we were right to do so. Of course it worked the other way too, but I remember only one instance of a member standing out for a book in a minority of one, and unable to make the majority concur with his desires. I have been so often wrong in my predilections, in our discussions, that I am proud to say that the recalcitrant member was myself and the book John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

We learned that the general intelligent public, about whom writers and publishers were always talking, wanted leadership even more than advice in their reading. If we gave them a skillful machinemade article from the production line, they were vaguely disappointed, for they wished to read books they liked, but better books, and, to some extent, different books from those they had been reading. Why ask to have books chosen for them which they obviously might have picked for themselves? If they were told a book was good and why, and the report was honest, and the book when it came out was not out of their range of interest, why then they gave it just that extra ounce of interest, that fillip of expectation, which, as everyone knows, makes the difference between indifferent and satisfactory reading. And furthermore, that interest carries the reader over and through the difficulties of a packed, an elusive, or a subtle book. Many an excellent volume, I am convinced, has failed to circulate as widely as it deserved because of the reader’s sluggishness rather than from any fault of the author.

As our catalogue of books chosen grew in length, we could look back with pride to an increasing number of titles that had been successful with the public, but successful also when viewed as contributions to literature. My own list of our most fortunate choices would include: Show Boat, by Edna Ferber; The Time of Man, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts; The Romantic Comedians, by Ellen Glasgow; Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis; The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence; Giants in the Earth, by O. E. Rolvaag; Abraham Lincoln, by Carl Sandburg; Bambi, by Felix Salten; John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét; Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset; All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque; The Good Companions, by J. B. Priestley; The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck; Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather; Mutiny on the Bounty, by Nordhoff and Hall; Anthony Adverse, by Hervey Allen; Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen; The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, by Franz Werfel; Heaven’s My Destination, by Thornton Wilder; Claudius the God, by Robert Graves; Life with Father, by Clarence Day; Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell; Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; The Yearling, by Marjorie kinnan Rawlings; Benjamin Franklin, by Carl Van Doren; New England: Indian Summer, by Van Wyck Brooks; For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway; H. M. Pulham, Esquire, by John P. Marquand; Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler; Independent People, by Halldor Laxness.

If my list is overbalanced by fiction, the reason is that many of our best non-fiction books were topical and informative, and have naturally not outlived their time.

4

AND so we discovered what any observers with like advantage would have found out: that the intelligent interest the American public had been grossly underestimated by publishers and advertisers. It was a public better educated and less provincial in its interests than either educators or booksellers had been willing to believe. It read by hundreds of thousands books we chose and sent out, which the publishers had hoped to dispose of as caviar by the thousands. Non-fiction, which (except for some religious books and histories) had been published for prestige as much as for profit, now reached the best-seller list and stayed there.

A new method of distribution was partly responsible for this result, but would have failed if there had not been throughout the country an unsatisfied demand. The statistical picture of published books, listed by categories and numbers sold, changed in a decade. Non-fiction improved its percentage greatly. The best-selling fiction became of much higher quality than the typical bestselling novel of the early 1900’s. I made a careful study of all this at one time and I am sure I am right.

It was a change in our national culture that at bottom was responsible. To say that America, in the years just before and after World War I, had come of age would be to say too much. But it is not too much to say that millions, instead of hundreds of thousands, of American readers did come of age in the two decades before we began our Book-of-the-Month Club experiment. The proportion of college graduates, who had at least done sound reading, increased; the proportion of high school graduates, who had at least been introduced to sound and adult reading, increased enormously — the numbers, indeed, of high school graduates doubled every ten years. Nor is it to be forgotten that after the end of the open frontier, economics and sociology became important for all intelligent people, even if they did not know what the words meant; and after our entrance into World War I, history came to life even for the most provincial. We, of course, did not create the demand for nonfiction and for sounder fiction, but it pleased us to think that by trial, error, and adventure, backed by original and adroit business methods, we had found one way of releasing it.

We learned also from sad experience that it was useless to choose a book because we thought it would do our readers good. The principle of the old-fashioned Sunday School library simply did not work with us. Temptation, especially when we got toward the war years, was very great. But experience soon taught us that the American wanted first of all a fine, an interesting, a memorable book. Advice, no matter how wise, information, no matter how important, he resented if that was all he got. He did not want to be sermonized, at least by our agency.

This may seem to have been merely a symptom of that age of indifference to great issues through which we so dangerously passed in the 1920’s, and which invited irreparable disaster. This is not true. We had the same experience long before the war clouds began to gather, and after they broke. Apparently the successful book with the intelligent American reader must be more than propaganda, whether for morals, economics, or politics. It must be first of all interesting, which means that it must touch the imagination. The Bible is propaganda from cover to cover — and is also a great work of uplifted imagination. Even so, my generation were made to read the Bible— for which I personally am deeply grateful.

5

THE last important lesson we learned was not to be afraid of racial, religious, or political prejudice, provided we had a good book. Again and again we expected a deluge of attacks because a novel, let us say, seemed to us strongly pro or anti Catholic or Jew or Protestant, dealt frankly with the Negro problem, or went far beyond the New Deal in its hopes and prophecies for the common man. We expected a deluge, and got a few raindrops. The assumption that racial, religious, and political groups in the United States differed more than they resembled each other was unwarranted. Actually they shared a common experience of American living; and when some aspect of that experience was honestly and imaginatively presented, they would read of it with tolerance and sympathy, even if they did not agree with either the interpretation or the solution.

One exception must be made — but not, I think, a real exception. Three times we have sent out books that described the despotism and the ruthless cruelties which have been used to create and then to buttress the modern totalitarian state. The first was the autobiography of Jan Valtin, whose career of double-dealing with both Nazis and Communists gave some cause for doubt as to his credibility. Whether he told the exact truth or not, there is nothing in his revelations that has not been duplicated and verified in later history. Violent and well-organized attacks were made upon this book by the intellectual leaders of the small American Communist Party.

The second example was an apparently innocent novel called The Fifth Seal, by a White Russian long an exile living in France, Marc Landau, whose pen name is Aldanov. The hero of this novel was a victim of totalitarian cruelty, whether by Nazis or the Russian government was not entirely clear. To our surprise, violent protests began to appear even before the book was published, signed often by liberal men and women who were certainly neither Nazis nor Communists. To our still greater surprise, it became clear on investigation that these critics had not even read the novel, and that all the hullabaloo had resulted from a chain letter sent out by a tiny group of leftists — who also had not read the book!

But the best description of the police methods of the Soviets was one of the finest novels of modern times — Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Against this novel I remember no protests of the least importance. It was too clearly not propaganda, but truth for the sake of truth, by an artist whose theme was human nature. Yet in many ways it was the most damning indictment of what modern man has learned to do to the souls of his fellow creatures.

We made many mistakes, of both omission and commission, and learned how to correct them as far as our own fallibility permitted, for we were a good-natured and conciliatory group, taking each of our defeats without rancor, and backing our enthusiasms or our dislikes without fear of ridicule or sensitiveness to prestige. And we grew better friends, and our minds worked together better and better as the years went on. We all knew that our responsibilities were as great as our opportunities.

If there had been no other satisfactions in what we were able to learn and to do than the last to be recorded, I should still feel my association with the Book-of-the-Month Club fortunate. Time and again we were able to lift the talented but unrecognized young writer from the ruck of best-sellers and publicized reputations and set him free on his way— free from the necessity of hack work or the pressure of relative poverty, and assured that not only his first book of importance, but also his next one, would have an audience ready which we had helped to make wide. Hervey Allen, Clarence Day, Stephen Vincent Benét, Stuart Chase, Walter Lippmann, Pearl S. Buck, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, can be listed as names now eminent. Our choice and our system were as effective on their behalf as the best-directed patronage of the classic eras of literature.

Neither poverty nor obscurity is valuable for talent or genius once the first fruits are ripe and ready for the picking. And new names and new ideas in writing have a tough time of it anyway, even when given a hearing. The Greeks may have been always seeking a new thing, but that is certainly not true of our reading public. The new thing (and the good thing) has to be brought to them. Our success in doing so would seem to indicate that selling tripe to the public may be easier, but is not necessarily more profitable, than giving them good meat.