The Book-of-the-Month Club: Synthesis of Culture and Class

(2018. Okay I’m gonna be real with you; unless you’re a real book nerd, like academic writing, or are a straight-up masochist, you probably shouldn’t read this long paper I wrote for social studies. Basically I was interested in the Book-of-the-Month Club and the ways it related to ideas of class in America. I came to this question because I was interested generally in the problem of getting Americans to read, taking as my assumption the idea that reading is essential to democracy. The real important takeaway for me from this paper was the idea that it IS possible to make high-quality literature a popular public phenomenon; the widespread distribution does not make literature less quality; that it is possible to have a well-read middle class. The question, now, is how to spark a modern cultural revival of reading on such a scale…)

America in the mid-twentieth century is remembered reverently as an idyllic time of relative equality amid the flourishing of a large middle class. Economic mobility was high, incomes were rising across the board, and many citizens had more leisure time than ever. There was also a culture of “neighborliness,” reflecting high trust and social engagement among citizens. Robert Putnam looks back to this period in his sociological research, most notably in his famous book Bowling Alone, as a time when communitarian values were prominent. These values created a society of joiners, in which people participated frequently in various formal and informal clubs, groups, and civic organizations. It seems that both civic life and culture in this period were more widely shared than ever before, especially in the robust middle class, with many positive results for society at large. This period, known as the “Great Compression,” arose as the result of a confluence of economic, social, and cultural developments that evolved over the first half of the century. My interest in the culture of this period, coupled with my love of reading and belief in the important role reading must play in human civilization, led me to a more specific desire to understand how book readership played into this phenomenon of the midcentury middle class. Before the 20th century, book readership was primarily the domain of the economic elite, but by midcentury middle class families across America owned large numbers of books. How did book readership become a middle-class value over the first half of the twentieth century? This paper will perform an intellectual history exploring how concepts of class status associated with book readership evolved over the period, using the Book-of-the-Month Club as a case study to illuminate the broader forces at play.

This question is particularly important given the current state of American social class and culture. America is currently experiencing trends of increasing inequality not seen for over a century. Culture is inextricably intertwined with socioeconomics, and analyses of this relationship have a rich Marxist tradition. I hope that this paper will shed light on some essential ways in which culture and class interact, which can inform modern social scientists and cultural critics alike in dealing with modern problems. Studying the democratizing, unifying, and enculturating forces of middle class culture in this period as represented by the Book-of-the-Month Club could help us to address the more balkanized cultural landscape of modern America, which is tied in important ways to the increasing disconnect between Americans across multiple dimensions, from insular socioeconomic neighborhoods to the ever-widening political gulf. Furthermore, there are implications for social capital research today to be found in that period of high social capital generation, and book groups are an understudied example of social capital generators. Finally, the middle class culture that arose over this period has continued to develop and impact modern American culture, so this research paper will interest those who care about the history of culture. The emergence of “middlebrow” culture as epitomized by the Book-of-the-Month Club has had significant consequences for the rest of the cultural spectrum, and influenced modern cultural phenomena such as Oprah’s Book Club.

We’ll begin with an overview of the history of book clubs in America leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. This history is one largely driven by white women, although for the purposes of this paper we will focus primarily on socioeconomic factors, rather than the impacts of race and gender. The tradition can be traced all the way back to the earliest colonial days, when Anne Hutchinson led a female discussion group in the 1630s which analyzed weekly sermons, before Hutchinson was condemned by the Massachusetts Bay Colony assembly. In 1727, Benjamin Franklin founded his famous Junto, which met weekly in Philadelphia to discuss works of literature, philosophy, politics, and science. By the late 1700s, women’s societies were forming across New England to discuss the belles lettres, like the prominent one founded by Hannah Mather Crocker in Boston in 1778 (Otto). These groups began to provide women with alternatives to traditional female roles, allowing them to “self-cultivate” through learning about literature, poetry, and science. It also provided them with a social circle, and membership in such circles was a sign that one was a respectable member of “society,” meaning high society. Margaret Fuller led a Socratic-style discussion group called “Conversations” from her bookshop starting in 1840. The oldest continually meeting literary club in America was founded in 1866 by Sarah Atwater Denman in Quincy, Illinois (Otto). A major development was the creation of Sorosis in New York City in 1868, when several female writers were barred from attending a New York Press Club event honoring Charles Dickens. Outraged at the exclusion, journalist Jane Cunningham Croly created the group with her female colleagues, which provided a model for many similar groups to pop up around the country in the late 19th century, such as the still-running Ladies’ Literary Club in Ypsilanti, Michigan (Burger). It ought to be noted that these were all groups of wealthy women, because only wealthy women had the education, leisure time, and combined resources to read, enjoy, and afford the belles lettres.

May Alden Ward, writing retrospectively in 1906 about these female literary groups, noted the many unique benefits that they offered members: they promoted female education by offering scholarships to women’s colleges, and they collaborated their resources in order to found many public libraries across the country and even a girls’ trade school in New York (Ward). These benefits would be described in today’s terms as the results of social capital, and I should note that it seems as if three main types of social capital were generated: bonding, or intragroup, by the group activities of the club and the friendships made; bridging, or intergroup, by the provision of scholarships for women who might otherwise be unable to afford college; and institutional, by the founding of social institutions such as public libraries (Svendsen).

Throughout the 1800s, a certain thread of thought surrounding books remained dominant, which can be called the “Arnoldian” view. “Culture” was the exclusive domain of the educated socioeconomic elite, the gentility, and Matthew Arnold epitomized the transatlantic genteel tradition. “‘Arnoldian’ can stand as a summary of its attitudes toward culture, character, discipline, training, democracy, and critical authority,” writes Rubin. “Arnold’s famous definition of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ became a slogan for allegiance to ‘standards,’ reverence toward the classics, and deference to critics skilled at sorting edifying books from the useless or harmful,” (Rubin 14). This view of culture not only made elites the exclusive consumers of culture (genteel culture was of course predicated on possession of enough wealth to afford the expensive pursuit of refinement); it also necessitated the existence of a gatekeeping class of expert critics who would determine what counts as culture. Thus, “people in search of self-reliance could attain it only by becoming dependent on a superior authority outside themselves” (Rubin 14). Additionally, the value orientations associated with the pursuit of culture were decidedly different for this genteel class than those which would later develop with the middle class. The emphasis for gentility was the concept of “self-culture,” which developed out of the Unitarian tradition in New England as articulated by William Ellery Channing (Rubin 14). These aristocratic men and women of culture pursued culture as a transcendental good, a God-given aspect of noblesse oblige, something valuable in itself. 

This Arnoldian view of books as an elite privilege for self-cultivation would eventually become threatened by the end of the century by powerful material developments, and it would fight to remain the dominant mode. The expansion of literacy to well over 90% of white Americans by the latter half of the 19th century meant that reading as an act itself was no longer the exclusive domain of the elite (Sicherman 141). Economics reacted to this development by natural laws, aided by improved production capabilities. Between 1880 and 1900, “American book publishers produced a threefold increase in titles and adopted new, aggressive marketing techniques to peddle them to the public,” and “[t]he growth of lending libraries made this surfeit readily available to book borrowers as well as purchasers,” (Rubin 18). This “desacralization” of reading was furthered by the proliferation of “hack” or “crap” books published with no author attribution, removing a key part of what made “literature” sacred. This was enabled by the dearth of copyright laws before 1891 (Rubin 18). In her 1956 book Villains Galore, Mary Noel wrote that “[w]ith capital came the ‘hack’, who was as much a product of the Industrial Revolution as was the Hoe printing press,” (Radway 132). This desacralization process engendered a reactionary stance from the Arnoldian elite, who sought to preserve their power as the owners of reading. Radway writes that “as publishing was increasingly affected by the imperatives of a commodity system driven by the need to increase production and consumption, a discourse of protectionism developed among some cultural arbiters who saw the traditional book as an endangered species and reading as an art in danger of extinction,” (Radway 139). They developed an almost missionary fervor for the conservation of cultural hierarchy, to maintain their gatekeeping functions and to determine what was and was not “literature” while the country was inundated with a growing pile of pages. This reactionary impulse will reoccur over and over throughout this story, and reflects some essential ways in which classes react to changes in base and superstructure, or even how human holders of power generally react to changes in and redistributions of the source of power.

Ironically, it is this very concept of the eliteness of book reading, the gentility of “Culture,” insisted upon by this upper class which perceived itself as besieged, which eventually led to the death of Arnoldian dominance over culture. The socioeconomic elite’s insistence on their essential ownership of Culture was an absurd and impossible illusion of ownership given the material circumstances of the Victorian period; rising incomes for a segment of the population combined with lowering book prices, increased book supply, and an increase in public library circulation meant that the rising nouveau riche and growing middle class of the period, while nowhere near as robust or democratic as the expanding middle class of the 1920s or the 1950s, now had a legitimate claim to the possession of culture, in their minds if not on their shelves. But elites still claimed that reading was elite, and this was the undoing of elite reading. For by this very insistence, the concept of book readership was irrevocably yoked to the concept of high class. In her essay “Reading and Middle Class Identity in Victorian America,” Barbara Sicherman writes that “[b]ooks— reading them, talking about them, sometimes owning them— became a marker of middle-class status, for some perhaps the critical marker. One might lose one’s money but presumably not one’s culture. In a world of flux, reading, the right reading, differentiated not only the middle from the lower classes but the genuinely cultured from the nouveaux riches,” (Sicherman 142). If there’s one thing that middle classes of all kinds across modern history have shared, it’s an aspirational posture; the middle class always wants to ape what they believe to be upper class. Thus, for those Victorian-era Americans who had the education to appreciate books and a desire to be cultured, “[b]ooks became symbols of the intangible cultural aspirations of the broad middle class,” (Sicherman 142). Books now symbolised culture; books now, in a sense, were “culture,” which “by this time… meant for one thing, more than another, the studious reading of books,” according to writer Mary Austin, recalling her youth in the 1870s and 1880s (Sicherman 137). This “culture” was cultural capital, a commodity to be possessed. This is evidenced by Austin’s language of commodity when she recalls that “[e]verybody wanted culture in the same way that a few years earlier everyone wanted sewing machines,” (Sicherman 137). The superstructural association of book readership and “Culture” with high socioeconomic class, when undermined by material developments in the base, led to the emergence of a new, middle class concept of book readership which diverged from the Arnoldian view. Books were once valuable for providing inward self-culture to those with capital and class; now, books were also valuable for providing outward cultural capital to those who wanted class. This subtle but decisive conceptual decoupling of books’ value marks the beginning of an antagonism between two different views of the value of book reading. These two concepts would continue to differentiate through the early 20th century, but the ultimate end of elite ownership of Culture was already apparent and underway. In other words, the aristocratic attitude towards Culture contained within itself the germ of its own abolition.

This new, second conception of books as class markers took a few decades to develop beyond its Victorian origin towards a truly commodified, utilitarian, and symbolic value scheme. The late 1800s material situation was simply not yet at the point necessary for this development. Even though books had become “symbols of the intangible cultural aspirations of the broad middle class,” these symbols were not as broadly commodifiable as they would become by the 1920s. In “Reading and Middle Class Identity in Victorian America,” Barbara Sicherman notes that  “access must be differentiated from ownership… The available evidence suggests that few families who constituted the broad middle class, as distinct from the wealthiest segments, owned large numbers of books, certainly not enough to satisfy the needs of avid readers,” (Sicherman 142). The middle class of Victorian America, a smaller and less powerful group than the middle classes that would emerge after each World War, had enough access to books and enough bourgeois aspiration to instigate the conceptual shift towards reading as cultural capital, but was not yet at the critical mass required to create a competing “middlebrow” culture beyond mere trickles bequeathed to them by the still-dominant aristocratic mode. Capitalist ownership is the key, and the aristocrats still owned most of the books, so the aristocrats still owned book culture. But the decisive move had already been made: “the more traditional discourse about the book had managed to associate the social prestige of learning with the particular technology for producing that learning in the first place, that is, with the leather- or cloth-covered book itself,” (Radway 145). Books as objects were the site of the emerging consumerist conception of the class implications of book readership. This created a demand, and the machinations of the capitalist free market took care of the rest. In the early 20th century, as the aspirational middle class continued to grow and the systems of supply continued to improve their capacity, publishers “began to see that the very idea of the book and the cultural value attributed to it could confer status on its owners, who, in the publishers’ unprecedented view, need not necessarily be readers,” (Radway 145). There was now a dedicated middle class market for books; the material base was becoming more and more solid; the superstructure was destined for change.

An important intermediary in this development of middle-class, consumerist reading culture was the Ladies’ Home Journal, “the most widely circulated, most influential women’s lifestyle magazine of the early twentieth century,” (Blair 1). The Journal reached millions of women in just the right middle class situation and taught them what Amy Blair calls “reading up,” in her book of the same name. In 1902 the Journal announced a new feature wherein readers would write requests asking cultural authority Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie to “tell us which among the books of to-day are really worth reading, and something of their authors” so that he would then “give each month his careful and competent advice as to which books are best worth while, and why” (Blair 1). Blair claims that “reading up” occurs “[w]hen a reader approaches a text because experts have deemed it ‘the best’ thing to read and reads in the interest of self-interest,” (Blair 3). Thus, reading up displays a deference to elite cultural authorities, highlighting the still-dominant Arnoldian mode. “Reading up evinces among the middle class a status anxiety that would not be fully exercised until the postwar period, when elitism became antithetical to respectability… reading up was so invested in the maintenance of cultural hierarchies, rather than in the blanket repudiation of disinterested and exclusive elites,” (Blair 3). The dialectic between the two conceptions of readership and class was still working itself out. This subservience to the dominant genteel literary tradition is exemplified excellently by a letter sent by one reader of the Ladies Home Journal to Mabie in 1906: “I venture to ask if you would be so kind as to give some idea how to start right to obtain culture,” she writes. “I have plenty of time and a good library at my disposal, but no money to employ teachers.” Mabie’s response: “To read only the best books,” (Rubin 1). The aspirational middle class has “plenty of time” and access to a library, but does not know the ins and outs of what makes culture Culture, according to the dominant tradition. The elites in this case are happy to help out, patronizingly, but they will modify their own codes in order to meet the middle class halfway, between both systems of value, contributing ultimately to the rise of the middle class system and the consequential dissolution of the old tradition.

The ways in which Mabie modifies his presentation of high culture demonstrate the metamorphosis and budding maturity of middlebrow reading culture as molded by the material and superstructural situation of the middle class in the early 20th century. Note that the “self-interest” mentioned previously in the definition of reading up is not the same thing as the “self-culture” of the old elite who valued books transcendentally; this self interest is based on the perceived cultural and material utility that the middle class expects to derive from readership. “Indeed, the language of aesthetics has no presence in this announcement [for Mabie’s new column], and in its place we find only the language of economics,” writes Blair. “Worth, profit, and usefulness have become the markers of a good book,” (Blair 1). Readership has class value in a transactional sense, rather than a transformative one. Mabie “spoke directly to the status anxieties in the new groups of readers who were caught by the wide net of the Journal’s ubiquity and whose lives were increasingly framed by American consumer culture,” (Blair 6). 

The material and superstructual situation of the middle class forced highbrows like Mabie to lower their brows for the general reader, and due to the widespread impact of the Journal’s massive readership, this brow-lowering affected the whole culture of readership in the United States. The example Blair gives of this brow-lowering is the Henry James novels which Mabie recommends his readers pick up. He does not recommend the later, more complex masterpieces critics adore, like The Golden Bowl; rather, he recommends James’ earlier and easier masterpieces like Portrait of a Lady. “The magazine’s dominant ideal, in short, was respectable display, and it was this goal that Mabie had to address with his approach to reading advice… guiding his readers to a taste that would confer the same kind of respectability that proper writing and speech, proper dress, or proper manners world,” (Blair 6). We can clearly see how this middle class orientation towards book reading as an aspirational, performative class act for the early 20th century consumer class derives directly from the quality of display inherent in the view of book reading as aspirational cultural capital we observed in the late 19th century bourgeoisie.  Blair goes on to later say that “[t]he early twentieth-century Journal encouraged its readers to dress, act, and think like the more moneyed elite, and a key channel for such upwardly focused behavior was the pursuit of genteel, highbrow literature,” (Blair 28). Reading up shares similarities with other performative self-improvement schemes popular at the time, such as elocution lessons. One is reminded of the young Jay Gatz practicing his elocution in his bedroom in North Dakota. However, we ought not caricaturize these bourgeois aspirants; many of them must have felt, on some level, the sincere desire to appreciate literature in the transformative way any genteel man or woman of letters would. This desire was simply mixed into the matrix of other upwardly focused performative and transactional bourgeois behaviors— they want to dress, act, and think like the elites, and to do that they must actually read the books. After all, as Owl-Eyes was so pleasantly shocked to discover, Gatsby’s books were all real. Regardless of original intentions, those who actually read books will grow because of it, due to the truth that lies behind the original idea of books as tools of self-cultivation.

A major step in mixing the Arnoldian and consumerist views of books was in the story of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot’s “Five Foot Shelf.” President Eliot was a famously learned man and a huge proponent of general liberal education. “He claimed… that every American should engage in perpetual education through the practice of self-guided reading. He even suggested that a five-foot shelf could hold all the books needed for a liberal education and that anyone could acquire learning through no more than fifteen minutes of reading a day” (Radway 145). Here we see the epitome of the Arnoldian self-cultured man attempting to spread his view of reading to the masses with an appeal towards convenience. He meant “five-foot shelf” in an abstract sense, but when pressed on it, he provided an actual list of the books for said shelf. In 1909, subscription house P.F. Collier & Son schemed to sell this shelf as the “Harvard Classics,” predicated on Eliot’s and Harvard’s cultural celebrity and capital. This moment concretizes what was mentioned earlier as the association of the social prestige of learning with the physical technology of the book. The Colliers’ Ad was specifically sure to include a utilitarian angle in their advertisements: “Do you realize how much more you could do and earn if you gave yourself a real chance, if for instance you knew the secret of fifteen minutes a day?” (Radway 145). Critics saw this as a bastardization of Eliot’s ideals of liberal education, charging that “advertising by Collier’s implied that the acquisition of a liberal education could be achieved without effort, indeed almost through the act of book ownership alone.” However, Eliot forever “believed that the series advanced the cause of liberal education because it celebrated a non-utilitarian love of learning for its own sake” (Radway 145). The series did indeed put many important classics on many shelves. However, it is impossible to ignore the commodification and standardization of elite culture represented by the Colliers’ moves.

This was followed in 1914 by a similar concept by one Harry Scherman, a New York advertiser. Scherman and his associates came up with the idea of the “Little Leather Library,” which sold millions of small, cheap, faux-leather books in drugstores across the country. These would be public-domain classics, like Shakespeare plays. The first package they offered was a Shakespeare book as complimentary with a box of chocolates in Woolworth’s stores across the country. It sold phenomenally. “That package deftly combined otherwise conflicting ideas about the value of the book in a single object,” writes Radway; it offered “a book aspiring middle-class readers could use, a utilitarian object whose very possession and display would create a nimbus of culture, thereby conferring a certain social status, even as it held out the contradictory promises of real cultural mastery and immediate gratification” (Radway 147). Its small size, its dime price, its association with the instant gratification of chocolate, its obvious use as a library “classic” for display, and its real value as literature all played into these swirling values about books and class culture. It was this experience with the Little Leather Library that, according to a later interview, taught Harry Scherman that “‘there was a tremendous demand by the American public for good literature. That was the main lesson, I’d say, that the Book-of-the-Month Club learned and demonstrates– its whole history demonstrates that” (Scherman 1956). Harry Scherman would found the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926 and forever alter the landscape of American reading.

The main thrust of this paper’s research is on this Book-of-the-Month Club. We will be using the Book-of-the-Month Club (hereafter BOTMC) as a case study to examine exactly how these different conceptions of books as associated with class culture came together and evolved with the emerging educated middle class after World War One and World War Two. The BOTMC was a mail-order subscription service which would send members a newsletter every month featuring the next month’s BOTM as well as a smattering of other reviewed alternate selections. The BOTM would be sent the next month to the member unless the member indicated they did not want it; the member only had to buy four books per year, and could select any of the alternate offerings if the BOTM did not appeal to them. The BOTM would be selected each month at a meeting of five judges, who were all well known for their literary taste. The BOTMC emerged as by far the most dominant mail-order book service, and possibly the most important single organization in the entire book industry. According to Gallup poll 410-T taken in the early 1950s, over 60% of respondents had at one time been a member of some book club (or a member of their immediate family) (Raff Table 23). Furthermore, of that 60%, 67% were a part of the BOTMC; the nearest competitor, the Literary Guild, only had 19% (Raff Table 24). This all must be considered in the light of the high turnover subscription services experienced of near 50%; so, keeping 500,000 subscribers in a year meant signing up 250,000 new clients annually. Overall, and accepting a degree of error, Gallup determined that around 22% of the population had at some point been in a household with a BOTMC subscription. The BOTMC clearly had enormous dominance in the widespread book club game; this dominance translated to high sales volume: according to BOTMC’s 1949 Annual Report, about 30% of book sales that year were made by subscription and mail order services (Raff Table 22). This clearly legitimizes the Club as a case study.

Ultimately, the relevance of the BOTMC can best be summarized by this closing statement of Harry Scherman’s during his 1956 interviews: “We have placed in American homes a total of around 150,000,000 books, far more than there are in all the libraries of the land, and they have been among the very best books written in our time” (Scherman 1956). The Book-of-the-Month Club was the dominant force in bringing books to Americans for the four decades after its inception in 1926. This is why it makes an ideal case for studying these questions of middle-class readership. The BOTMC is both an explanation for why members of the middle class started reading more and an example of one of the main ways they were able to do so. In these explorations we will see how the BOTMC arose out of the material conditions of the time as well as out of competing discourses about book readership; we will also see how it contributed to the evolution of these discourses, given Scherman’s claim to literary quality. To conduct this research, I analyzed nearly a thousand pages of microfiche transcripts from the Columbia Oral History Research Office’s 1956 interviews with Harry Scherman and over a dozen other important figures in the BOTMC organization. This is supplemented by analysis of old BOTMC advertisements and a few key secondary sources on the Club. In the end, we will argue that the Book-of-the-Month Club worked because it authentically embodied and synthesized both competing discourses about book readership, which thus brought the self-cultivating powers of books to a much larger audience than had ever before been seen in world history while simultaneously weakening the strict class status associated with books.

The Book-of-the-Month Club’s origination and its decades of success were enabled by many material conditions. The publishing market did very well in the 1920s: between 1920 and 1929 it expanded from the publication of 6,000 major titles to 10,000 (Rubin 31). Furthermore, there was more leisure time available to a growing middle class in this period: “[t]he shortening of the work week and the spread of the eight-hour day gave at least some parts of the population more opportunity to encounter those titles,” (Rubin 31). This increase in leisure only increased as general affluence increased after the Depression, although the BOTMC also performed well during the Depression, since many other commodities were more heavily restricted at the time. Perhaps most importantly, K-12 education and higher education expanded significantly over the course of the first half of the 20th century. The expansion of the public school system contributed to this early on: between 1910 and 1920 the amount of public high school graduates in the country doubled (Raff Table 2). The amount of college graduates doubled between 1920 and 1930 to over 1 million (Rubin 31). Between 1927 and 1947, which was around the club’s subscription peak, the total percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in higher education doubled from 7.2% to 14.2%; by 1957 it had reached 22% (Raff Table 37). This all matters very much, not only because of the increase in literacy and interest in books which education naturally brings, but also because it was college graduates who composed the largest demographic for the BOTMC. According to the BOTMC’s Annual Report for 1947, 67% of their subscribers had attended college. The target demographic skewed young; the under-30 group composed 48% of the Club’s membership at that time, and the 30-39 group was next with 28% (Raff Table 30). By 1954, these two composed 31% and 30%, respectively, while the college-graduate percentage had shot up to 81% (Scherman 1955); this likely reflects the settling down of the post-GI Bill educated middle class. Scherman described the BOTMC’s demographic leanings this way: “What Gallup has discovered about the composition of our members is particularly interesting. They started out, as I recall, being preponderantly elderly people or well-to-do people who had got along pretty well and who wanted to keep up with the best books” but soon it became “apparent that we were appealing very largely to university graduates, or people who weren’t graduates but who had decided leanings in a cultural direction, and that these were youngish people, married people in their middle thirties– or early forties– who suddenly began to realize that they were more or less vegetating intellectually… the cultural interests they had acquired in college were being completely neglected. They would have something of a sense of guilt about it… I would say it is the most representative type we have” (Scherman 1955). This “representative type” became increasingly common in America between the 1920s and 1950s. The final material circumstance which enabled the rise of the BOTMC was the proliferation of rural free delivery routes run by the US Postal Service, which exploded from only 28,685 miles in 1900 to 1,151,832 miles by 1920 (Raff Table 6). It was this key development in distribution that paved the way for the BOTMC, which was created in order to take advantage of the distribution capabilities of the postal service.

Based on the interviews conducted with Mr. Scherman and others in the organization, there can be no doubt that the primary impetus behind the formation of the Book-of-the-Month Club was economic, in the books-as-commodities mode of thinking. Scherman was a salesman, a Wharton dropout, and he saw obvious economic opportunity in the gap between book demand and book distribution. The genesis of the Book-of-the-Month Club came from the combination of the lessons Scherman learned from his Little Leather Library venture and these new distributionary capabilities. In his interviews, Scherman notes that, at the time, you could sell individual books by mail only with broad consumer “use” value, like “Power of Will,” “American Gardening,” or “Book of Etiquette,” “but you couldn’t sell the new fiction, or new non-fiction, books about which the general public knew nothing. The perfectly obvious reason for that was that the single book couldn’t stand the selling cost” (Scherman 1955). He saw the solution: “if the selling cost could be applied to or spread over a number of books that problem could be solved. That was the genesis of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Somebody had to take a group of books. It couldn’t be immediate, because people were not buying groups of books immediately: therefore, they had to buy over a period of time. It therefore had to be something like a subscription,” (Scherman 1955). The BOTMC was created out of economic laws of supply and demand; the demand for good reading was there, as he learned from the Little Leather Library and the success of such ventures as Eliot’s Harvard Classics. But information about new books had no way of reaching consumers, and keeping up with newness was an emerging necessity of modernity. The supply side was opened up by the new methods of mass distribution by mail, which could reach “where no bookstores could go, and certainly where very few of them had gone: to every village and hamlet with a post office in the United States— something like 40,000 of these, whereas there are only a few thousand retailing bookstores as centers of distribution for books and only about 500 of them that certain cautious publishers will give credit to” (Scherman 1955). There was an enormous market yet to be tapped, and Harry Scherman tapped it. As Radway put it, “[t]he Book-of-the-Month Club was nothing more or less than the application of the modern logic of integration to the realm of book production and distribution,” (Radway 175). However, as the interactive evolution of both modes of thought regarding book culture demonstrated earlier, particularly with the example of Hamilton Wright Mabie, new book readers demanded a cultural authority upon which to base their book purchases, in order to feel like they were buying books worth reading and which had real cultural value. Of course, any individual publisher’s authority would be seen as structurally biased towards its own books, so “[w]e had to have, therefore, a disinterested group to choose the books. This was the origin of the selecting committee” (Scherman 1956). Thus, even the committee of cultural judges, the Arnoldian authorities upon whom the cultural legitimacy of the enterprise depended, was formed out of economic necessity. The committee “functioned collectively as a bureaucratic subdivision in a larger system, and contributed to the smooth integration and smooth functioning of the operation as a whole,” (Radway 182). The growing dominance of the consumerist view of books by 1926 is highlighted by the Book-of-the-Month Club’s origin story.

The view of the BOTMC as a force for the consumerist mode of valuing books as commodities of cultural capital is supported by the consistency with which its advertisements played on the theme of reading as a social necessity. Judge John Marquand once complained of how the BOTMC News sent out each month featuring reviews of the next month’s BOTM and alternate options was “naturally a sales paper. The reports have to be laudatory and over-enthusiastic” (Marquand 1956). Of course, this is understandable given the fact that all of these books were chosen as the best of the month, but it still reveals the commercial aspect of the enterprise’s public face. Most of the BOTMC’s advertising was centered around the idea that many people wish they were caught up on all the new books, but weren’t, and it was frequently implied that this would hurt them in social conversation. A 1927 brochure reminded potential subscribers that neglect of the latest books meant a loss of “fine camaraderie.” But not to worry— the subscriber, informed about all the newest books, “knows about them and can talk about them,” (Rubin 101). This implies that talking about books is an important reason for reading them, and that reliance on the consumerist convenience and Arnoldian expertise dually provided by a membership to the Book-of-the-Month Club would solve this problem of individual neglect. A 1935 ad highlights the aspirational desires of the middle class by imploring would-be subscribers to join “the intellectual elite of the country” (Rubin 105). This is the most blatant example I found of BOTMC explicitly selling cultural elitism. It still, however, holds to the idea that members would actually read the books; many of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s many imitators were not so allied to a belief in true readership. The Literary Guild, the second biggest mail-order book club, was typically seen as a more commercial venture; according to Scherman’s 1956 interview, the Literary Guild “quite deliberately set out to pick popular books, books that would likely sell widely in the trade.” The Literary Guild’s more wholesale swallowing of the hollow books-as-performative-cultural-capital mindset is epitomized by their advertisement which read “The Hall-Mark of Literary Distinction: The Guild Book on Your Table,” (Rubin 105). While the BOTMC never went this far in suggesting a pure display value (the book as valuable on the table rather than in one’s head), the Literary Guild and other imitators were all the direct product of the BOTMC’s success. The BOTMC prided itself on being more legitimately “literary” and high-quality; however, this, too, was part of its consumer appeal. Christopher Morley, one of the BOTMC judges, was once advertisingly described in this way, which can only be described as pornographic elitism: “Seasoned at Oxford, he has the air of a man who has been reading old books and drinking old wine with old friends before a fire of old wood,” (Radway 181). Even the Arnoldian literariness of the BOTMC was itself a market appeal to the growing educated classes, which demonstrates how the consumerist mode had become fully dominant across culture and class. Axel Rosin, Scherman’s son-in-law and successor as president of the Club, said in his interview that it was “essential for us that people associate the Book-of-the-Month Club with culture. It is also essential for us personally, I think,” (Rosin 1956). The management, in short, was aware of the cultural-capital consumer value of their cultured brand. However, to be fair, this quote also indicates that they felt that their culture was personally important based on some higher principles, and this leads us into the complications of viewing the Book-of-the-Month Club purely through the consumerist lens.

The interviews with Mr. Scherman and his coworkers reveal a moving sincerity of belief in the value of their cultural mission, which lends power to the idea that the BOTMC truly cared about helping people appreciate literature for its own sake. The strict separation between the business side of the operation and the book-selection process demonstrates this. Scherman says that he explained to the judges “that they could be absolutely independent in their judgments, that any book they chose we would use. That assurance was absolutely necessary,” (Scherman 1956), and it wasn’t necessary for purely economic reasons. Over and over, Scherman’s coworkers describe how he frequently went above and beyond to maintain the liberty of the judges to exercise their cultural authority in order to get the best books to subscribers, even if he thought it might be at an economic loss. Judge Clifton Fadiman said that it “is a fact that the management, month after month and year after year, has sat by with stoical patience watching us choose books which in many cases they do not like, and never a word is said until some months later. It comes out in one way or another, but they have never influenced out choices in the slightest degree.” He goes on later to say that “I’ve never known Harry to make a judgment about whether a book will sell or not; for a businessman, he seems curiously apathetic to commerce… He’s the chairman of the board and, I think, of the group he is the least commercial minded,” (Fadiman 1956). This basic sentiment regarding Scherman’s religious respect for non-intervention was echoed by three other judges. By keeping the business and culture distinct, Scherman was able to use the power of the market while not compromising literary value. This lack of pure capitalization is supported by other aspects of the company. “The books that we review in the News, we buy from the publisher at the regular discount… We don’t make any money on these extra books we sell, because it costs us too much to get them, but we do it because we feel that we want to as a service for our subscribers,” (Rosin 1956). Ralph Thompson was in charge of coordinating the vast reading and screening process, which involved reading over 200 books a month with a large staff of readers who would send the best books up to the judges. He said that“[i]f all the Club wanted to do was sell books in quantity, I could sit here alone and make the decisions, and we could throw out the whole God-damned reading department, the whole editorial department, which must cost the company a quarter of a million dollars a year to run,” (Thompson 1956). Clearly, quality was a consideration as well as quantity. The missionary aspect of the BOTMC is further revealed by Harry Scherman’s generosity, which Thompson noted led to roughly $10,000,000 worth of books given away for free every year, as book dividends or just as little gifts. Fadiman praises how “Mr. Scherman, with characteristic generosity, had a way of doing that every once in a while, taking a smallish book… and making a gift of it to the membership,” (Fadiman 1956). All of this shows that the BOTMC’s motives were at least not entirely capitalistic.

The interviews further reveal a new conception of the American reading public as a genuinely curious group which desires books for sincerely cultural reasons. Scherman maintained that all of his advertising was organized around the central assumption that “all we need to do is arouse people to the fact that they are backsliding on their own good intentions… just to make people aware of what they themselves want to do but which, because of the circumstances of their lives, they are not doing well enough to suit themselves” (Scherman 1956). The people, in other words, have an authentic desire for self-culture, according to the beliefs of Harry Scherman. “It wasn’t that they just wanted to keep up with the good books just to be able to talk about them. That is plain nonsense… This is an individual appeal. The subscriber doesn’t want to read books in order to be able to talk about them; he wants to read books!.. He would have no sense of guilt if he didn’t already have a very active curiosity,” (Scherman 1956). His members, he argued, are “not the people trying to reach out beyond their status, say; there is nothing social about it. It is a reflection of something inside themselves, a kind of urge– not to improve themselves for the estimation of other people, but to keep up with their own standards,” (Scherman 1956). Furthermore, the Club’s research, assisted by associate George Gallup, indicated that “[m]ost of the books by far are read, by someone in the family,” (Scherman 1956). All of this gave Scherman and the other club officials a high opinion of the American reading public. The Club’s research found that their five-million-plus American readers “don’t respect the ‘popular’ book. They are much more interested in reading, and much more curious about, the book of high quality, of a rare type… we get more ‘kicks’ about the ‘popular’ books,” (Scherman 1955). “Kicks” referred to book returns and negative feedback letters. “For years the most popular book we had ever sent out was ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ by Sigrid Undset, a Nobel Prize winner, the book we found in our surveys at the time to be the most liked, the one that most impressed them upon reading. They really want books they can bite into and which they feel worth having spent their time upon. They don’t want the ephemeral book,” (Scherman 1955). This is a direct repudiation of the early middle-class consumerist view of books as an ephemeral product. This all served to create an entirely new conception of “the masses.” “Dealing with the public in this way, I have acquired the deepest respect for the run-of-the-mill American– and, of course, his interests rise as his education broadens,” said Scherman. “Now, perhaps it is true that this is not the run-of-the-mill American, but rather the upper strata. However, it goes pretty far down into American life, farther down than most people realize,” (Scherman 1955). Due to increasing high school and college graduated populations creating a larger and larger population of readers who had been exposed to the transcendental value of book reading, Scherman believed that, at least among the reading population, “you can say that this is the run-of-the-mill American,” (Scherman 1955). Thompson echoed this, saying that “[t]here is not one ‘American reading public.’ There are many, covering an immense area of curiosities and interests. They grade into one another, and the individuals in the topmost intellectual level are more numerous here than in any other nation in the world.” Gone is the strict binary of high and low, appreciation and consumption. The BOTMC officials truly believed in a new vision of a large American reading public that valued books for their own sakes, and even though there would still be differences in intellectual value, these differences would exist along an unbroken gradient rather than be owned and defined by an elite socioeconomic class. The middle class now had an equal ownership of culture, and the Book-of-the-Month Club helped make this happen. The Club took its role as a cultural missionary seriously, and eventually expanded into the dissemination of educational art miniatures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and of educational classical music records through their Music Appreciation Records series.

The main criticism of the Book-of-the-Month Club as a consumerist-oriented, standards-lowering force in American reading culture is belied by the high quality of the books selected by the club. The main criticism made against the BOTMC was that the attention of the general public would be focused upon single books, creating a hollowing, standardizing effect on public reading. Harry Scherman responded directly to this, saying that to “meet that perfectly legitimate criticism, we altered the idea considerably by agreeing to do two things. First, we agreed to let this group choose all the books which they found to be of some consequence in any month, and to report on them, and second, to allow the subscriber to return the BOTM, if he received it, in exchange for one of those. In that way the reader had the whole field of books to choose from. Far from having his choice limited it was broadened, and he was more informed than most individuals would otherwise be about what was currently desirable reading,” (Scherman 1956). By providing information on a half-dozen to a dozen of the best new books of every genre every month, the BOTMC provided liberal choices for readers who otherwise would not have been informed about all of the exciting new books coming out. While New York intellectuals might have been able to self-cultivate better without such direction, this undoubtedly broadened the horizons of the majority of subscribers in small towns across America who would otherwise not have such information. Fadiman agreed, comparing the BOTMC’s role as recommender to that of a bookstore clerk or librarian, and emphasized that “[t]he safeguards against authoritarianism, as it were, are many, and I believe the net effect has been that we have opened up to a public which ordinarily would not read books the chance of reading many good books every year,” (Fadiman 1956). Meredith Wood emphasized that the total BOTMC alternate offerings “have included almost every important book published in the past quarter century,” and said that, examining the BOTMC’s history of selections, it is “absurd to think that authors must ‘write down’’ to a low level of interest in order to obtain a wide public,” (Wood 1956). He even went so far as to claim that “[m]ost of our judges, at one time or another, I believe, have served on the Pulitzer committees. We know from what they have told us that the Pulitzer committee can’t be as thorough once a year as we are every month,” (Wood 1956). Axel Rosin pointed to a study done by a Princeton student for a thesis a few years before the interviews, wherein the student aggregated positive and negative book reviews from a major industry reference book, assigned them numerical value, and then charted Books-of-the-Month, Literary Guild selections, the best-seller lists, and a random sample. “And way on top of the graph you’ll find the BOTM,” Rosin says, “and the others are way down at the bottom, including the best-seller lists– they’re far below,” (Rosin 1956). The high quality of their judges panel, which was led by a Yale English Professor and composed of extremely well-read experts, embodied the ideal of books as a transcendental self-culturing force, and truly recommended quality books. Even though this self-culture was recommended by authorities, it still held that power for the Club membership at large. The Book-of-the-Month Club faithfully recommended what they believed were truly the best new books, and believed that their representative educated American middle-class readers could handle, and even desired, quality literature.

Thus, while there may be some slight legitimacy to the claims of “highbrow” critics that the BOTMC lowered readership standards, on the whole these criticisms are unfounded. The standard-bearer for such highbrow criticism is Dwight MacDonald, who denounced “middlebrow” culture in his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult,” in which he implicated the Book-of-the-Month Club as a prime suspect in the pernicious rise of middlebrow culture, which, in his view, threatened the very existence of high culture (MacDonald 37). The “middlebrow” was formed by a long process of mixing forms and values associated with elite forms of cultural reproduction, over which elites felt they had ownership, with forms and values associated with middle-class consumerism. Radway writes that “the scandal of the middlebrow was a function of its failure to maintain the fences cordoning off culture from commerce, the sacred from the profane, and the low from the high,” (Radway 152). This scandalized those elite intellectuals who felt they deserved ownership of Culture in general, but the reality was that consumer capitalism had won an inevitable and total victory. “Scherman challenged this separation in many ways but most obviously by too openly selling Culture, thereby baldly exposing its prior status as a form of capital — symbolic capital, to be sure— but capital nonetheless. His organization proved troublesome, then, because it refused to perpetuate the distinction between two forms of value, one determined economically by the operations of particular interests in the market, the other understood to be fixed, universal, and transcendent,” (Radway 152). The highbrow reaction demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge what had always been true; that culture was a commodity, and that, in the relatively flattened economic distribution of affluent midcentury America, this commodity could be owned by a vastly larger population than ever. The Book-of-the-Month Club succeeded by perfecting the balance between the two strains of book culture that it inherited, holding “these contradictory logics in creative tension, fostering the operation of a consumer business on one hand while preserving the ideological reign of literary and cultural distinction on the other,” (Radway 183). In other words, the BOTMC did not kill the ideology of books as valuable agents of self-culture; it simply married this concept to the inevitable and necessary machinations of the market. It spread books throughout the superstructure with a belief in their transcendental value, by using the base structures of distribution available. It dissolved what was ultimately an invidious distinction and brought Culture to the masses. BOTMC official Warren Lynch related an example of the silliness of “highbrow” reactions to the BOTMC, remembering how George Gallup conducted interviews with English professors to ask them what they thought of the BOTMC. “Many of them said, in effect, that the books were beneath their dignity. Yet when he asked them what contemporary books they had been reading in the past year, he discovered that many of the books they had been reading in the past year were our selections,” (Lynch 1956). The separation between high culture and middlebrow culture was an illusion, an illusion incentivized by the tradition of reactionary gatekeeping done by elites to cling to their cultural power, and perpetuated by narratives that portrayed the Book-of-the-Month Club and its imitators as purely commercial ventures with no literary allegiance (a narrative that was admittedly emboldened by the Literary Guild and its popularity-minded ilk.) In reality, the BOTMC was high culture, in the sense that it promoted the very best new books. It simply brought culture to the masses, who, traditionally, were not supposed to have it.

To be fair, I must admit a single moment I encountered in the interview transcripts that disturbs this conclusion. Near the start of the BOTMC, in January 1927, it sent out “The Heart of Emerson’s Journals” to its 40,000 subscribers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was, of course, one of America’s greatest philosophers, and his journal was his lifelong project. His role in Boston and Unitarian intellectual society places him squarely at the center of the “self-cultivation” tradition. And, sadly, this was the Club’s greatest flop. “That book just came back by the cartload,” Harry Scherman remembered. “The country didn’t want “The Heart of Emerson’s Journals”; they didn’t want any part of Emerson’s Journals,” (Scherman 1956). This rejection by the masses of an essentially Arnoldian gem seems to support detractors who say that the Club couldn’t really bring high culture to the masses without lowering their standards a bit. However, this was early in the Club’s existence; they had not yet developed their innovative method of letting their subscribers know of the next month’s book ahead of time, so those who were uninterested in Emerson’s journals had to return it after receiving it. Later on, they would get a chance to choose an alternate ahead of time, and this shows how the liberalization of choice for readers among many quality books improved the Club’s model. To impose a single book as they did was a more Arnoldian move than they would later embrace. Furthermore, if we believe that the Book-of-the-Month Club truly raised literary culture in the United States amongst its subscribers over time, then we can even speculate that Emerson’s Journals might have performed better a decade or so later, possibly as an alternate selection for those who chose to self-cultivate in that direction.

Ultimately, I think that it is fair to say that any negative effects the Book-of-the-Month Club might have had were enormously outweighed by the great public good that they performed. The Club contributed greatly to raising up American culture by penetrating into small towns around the country which had no bookstores and where folks had no information about new books. There was an enormous material opportunity in the lack of access, the potential for distribution, and the authentic desires of those who had had a taste of book-reading in high school and college education. Harry Scherman capitalized on this opportunity, but the results were far more than material; he brought legitimate culture, with transcendental value, to more Americans than ever before. The desire for books was so real that the Club even went through the Great Depression with flying colors. While it is criticized for “standardizing taste,” the archival evidence indicates that this was not the case, or at least not a strongly negative effect. Judge Meredith Wood said that it is “plain that the promotion of original taste in reading among great masses of those who have recently been non-readers is impossible. A somewhat regimented taste under wise direction is better than no taste at all,” (Wood 1956). I am inclined to agree. Using markets and authorities to promote general culture may feel like desacralization to those who once felt they owned culture just as they owned markets. However, if one truly believes in the transcendental power of books then they ought to believe in the enormously beneficial effects that the BOTMC had on millions of American minds. Placing 150,000,000 quality books in American homes, more than in all the libraries of the land, cannot have failed to broaden the country’s collective imagination in unquantifiable yet unimaginably consequential ways. Robert Haas, one of Scherman’s original partners, said that “I think the whole country is more aware of books than it would have been had it simply been fed by the so-called ‘book trade,’” (Haas 1956). In other words, the BOTMC was not a purely market-oriented operation; they made a personally important effort to truly spread awareness and ownership of quality books, even if they might have made more money by focusing more on potential lowest-common-denominator popularity. They believed that a market existed for quality literature, a market which organically existed in the minds of curious Americans who just needed access and information. This belief led them to use the power of the market to promote quality books, which went against the late-19th century trend of mass-market reading towards the proliferation of “crap.” In direct contrast to those who assert that the BOTMC lowered reading standards, Haas even goes so far as to say that, compared to the best-sellers of 25 years before the interview, “[t]oday’s are that much better. I happen to believe that this is in some measure due to the influence of the Club,” (Haas 1956). They helped make great books more popular, rather than helping popular books appear great, as some critics argued.

The BOTMC created a new reading public, more massive than any before seen on earth, and they cultivated in that public a habit of reading, thanks to the nature of their subscription service.  This is an intriguing example of the superstructure influencing the base; rather than the masses pulling down literary culture, literary culture pulled the masses up. Of course, this definition of “literary culture” was embodied in this instance by those experts who felt it was important to share their culture with other classes of people and allowed the lines between classes to blur; other experts clung to their Arnoldian inheritance kicking and screaming from ivory towers, without realizing that it was never their inheritance to begin with, that the market had already won, and that the victory was good for everyone. The BOTMC vindicated the Emersonian view of books as a self-evident good through the mechanisms of the market in its demand for good books, while simultaneously severing sole possession of this good from its original Arnoldian champions. Furthermore, this definition of “the masses” is a qualified one as well; while the millions of BOTMC members were seen by Scherman as representatives of a new, educated, middle-class American, they were still not necessarily “run-of-the-mill.” Our view of “average” tends always to skew upward along the socioeconomic scale, since those higher up have more power and visibility. The truly “average” American of the time did not have a college education and was likely not a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club. However, the center of gravity bulged dramatically upwards during the first half of the 20th century, and a broad, relatively educated middle class was ascendent. This was what the BOTMC catered to, and bringing quality literature to this group is still a worthy achievement as well as an agent of greater equality; even if this middle class of readers was not truly in the “middle,” it was still far more democratic and far larger than any before in human history. The Book-of-the-Month Club’s expansion of literary culture, to my mind, is an important and underlooked cultural aspect of the “Great Compression” which occurred in America around the middle of the 20th century.

The findings of this paper have a lot of implications for further exploration of this deeply interesting topic. The most obvious extension would be to continue tracing the story of the manifold impacts of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the interactions between culture and class through to the present. This story would include the rise of cheap paperback bookstores and the impact of television, as represented by Oprah’s enormously successful televised book club. The idea of reactionary elite gatekeeping around a concept that has been democratized is an intriguing one, which I imagine has many echoes across different cultural phenomena— for example, the difference between “movies” and “film.” The theoretical Marxist and Frankfurt School implications regarding culture industries revealed by this paper seem promising. One interesting research extension would be to look at how the common readership of the Book-of-the-Month possibly increased social capital during the Great Compression; after all, if 10 families in a neighborhood have all received the same book, then they have a common topic which foster social connections. Finally, the most interesting implications of this research for me come from the discovery that the mixing of consumerism and culture does not have to be an inherently bad thing; that material powers, if used right, can be agents of broad cultural expansion, individual enlightenment, and societal improvement. This project has gotten me thinking deeply about what a truly new 21st century version of the Book-of-the-Month Club would look like; or, more accurately, what opportunities a 21st century Harry Scherman would see in the internet, Amazon, and social media and how he would use these new structures and ideas to create a novel organization for the spreading of quality literature. As someone who knows that history is always unfolding out of itself, and who believes deeply in the magical power of books to improve minds, lives, and societies, the possibilities now seem endless.

Works Cited

Secondary Sources

Blair, Amy. Reading Up. Temple University Press, 2012.

Burger, Pamela. “Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club.” JSTOR Daily, August 12, 2015. https://daily.jstor.org/feature-book-club/. 

Otto, Audra. “The Evolution of American Book Clubs: A Timeline.” MinnPost, September 15, 2009. https://www.minnpost.com/books/2009/09/evolution-american-book-clubs-timeline/. 

Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books. The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Raff, Daniel. “The Book-of-the-Month Club: A Reconsideration.” Yale Economic History Workshop, November 27, 2017.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America.” Reading Acts, edited by Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas. University of Tennessee Press Knoxville, 2002, pp. 137-160.

Ward, May Alden. “The Influence of Women’s Clubs in New England and in the Middle-Eastern States.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 28, September 1906, pp. 7-28.

Primary Sources

Starr, Louis. “The Reminiscences of Harry Scherman.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 32, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.

Starr, Louis. “An Interview with Axel Rosin.” The Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 153, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.

Starr, Louis. “Clifton Fadiman.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 62, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.

Starr, Louis. “Ralph Thompson.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 189, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.

Starr, Louis. “Meredith Wood.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 206, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.

Starr, Louis. “John Marquand.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 130, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.Starr, Louis. “Robert K. Haas.” Book-of-the-Month Club. Interview 1956. Columbia Oral History Collection, Part IV, No. 89, 1972. Microfiche W 286, Lamont Library.