Nicola Wilson (University of Reading) will be presenting her paper, ‘Authors Take Sides: Britain’s First Book-of-the-Month Club in the Shadow of War’, at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 26 March 2019. The talk will take place in the Cardiff University’s John Percival Building, Room 2.01, and will be followed by a wine reception.
Abstract
The Book Society was set up in 1928 to boost book-buying in a time of mass library-borrowing. By 1930 it had over 10,000 members receiving a new, full-price book each month. The club’s Choices and Recommendations made a huge impact on a book’s sales and circulation and publishers of all types were keen to receive what Harold Raymond called ‘the Book Society bun’. The book club was fronted by a line-up of popular writers, literary celebrities and the odd academic: Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Clemence Dane, Sylvia Lynd, Edmund Blunden. Priestley called themselves ‘broadbrows’. In the turbulence of the late 1930s, Popular Front spokesman Cecil Day-Lewis was brought on to help the club navigate the growing threat of fascism, at home and abroad. This paper, based on new work from my book on The Book Society, looks at debates among the selection committee in the run-up to WW2 and how the Book Society News sought to navigate a world at sea. Focussed on literary and political debates among the judges in the context of appeasement, and particularly the tension between Day-Lewis and WW1 poet Edmund Blunden, it considers how Britain’s first book-of-the-month club sought to keep readers informed during the chaos of the late 1930s and how individual personalities clashed in its monthly periodical to produce a dynamic, contested read.
About the speaker
Dr Nicola Wilson is Lecturer in Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading. She specialises in C20 print culture, feminism, and working-class writing. She is author of Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015) and co-author of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017). She has written various chapters and articles on the history of reading, circulating libraries, colonial editions and literary censorship. She is writing a new book on The Book Society (1929-69) and is editor of the Ethel Carnie Holdsworth series.
