Word: guild
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...Push. By now, few bookmen would deny that the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild and some 50 other clubs have stimulated book reading and book buying. Privately, most booksellers admit that the clubs have often helped their business over the past 25 years (BoM started in 1926, the Guild in 1927). A glance at almost any list of bookstore bestsellers shows that most of them got under way to the accompaniment of book-club ballyhoo and the word-of-mouth created by a book-club choice. And it is a pretty good bet that such nonfiction bestsellers...
Matter of Taste. Though club membership is now well below the alltime highs of 1946 (BoM down from nearly 1,000,000 to 550,000, the Guild from 1,250,000 to around 700,000), the big clubs are still the richest plums in the book business. B-o-M sent out more than 7,000,000 books last year, showed a net profit (after taxes) of nearly $1,250,000. The Literary Guild, the Dollar Book Club and a group of other clubs, all owned by Doubleday, do so well that Doubleday can afford to shrug off the charge...
Where the clubs get touchy is in the matter of quality. Both the Guild and B-o-M started with brave promises. Early in the game, B-o-M Founder Harry Scherman offered readers "the outstanding book published each month"; in practice, this led to the selection of such books as Rol-vaag's Giants in the Earth, Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. The club's sights have come down a bit. A B-o-M choice is now just a book that the club's five judges* happen to "like...
...Literary Guild has gone through a greater shift. "Literature!-Not Just Books" was the cry in the first number of the Guild's booklet Wings, under Editor in Chief Carl Van Doren. For a while, the Guild tried to find books that "will be permanently important." It chose the work of such writers as Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, Novelists Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Historian Claude Bowers. When Publisher Nelson Doubleday took over in 1934, all that changed. Guild Judge Burton Rascoe gave Guild members ten Doubleday books out of 13 in 1935. That vulnerable policy changed...
Next week's session will have the American Theatre Guild of the Air recording of "Hamlet" with John Gielgud and Pamela Brown...