Abstract
One of the most prominent book clubs in the
Focusing in particular on books translated into English from German, this paper will present new data on originally foreign-language books that were selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club judges, thereby guaranteeing European authors maximum visibility and exorbitant sales in the
Worldwide, millions of readers have accessed their reading material and entertainment media through mail-order book sales clubs like Círculo de Lectores, the Nederlandse Boekenclub, Bertelsmann Club or the Book-of-the-Month Club. Based on a subscription model, book sales clubs offered their members a catalogue of books and other media, often at attractive discounts, or through package deals. Through membership numbers and sales experiences, the book sales clubs had a ‘gewisse Sicherheit in der Kalkulation und eine entsprechende Absatzgarantie hoher Auflagen’.1 Generally speaking, there is a large degree of variation among the structures and subscription models implemented by book sales clubs around the globe over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century: Some book sales clubs bought licenses for publishers’ titles, selling them to members (often cheaply); other book sales clubs produced their own titles. Some book clubs charged a flat annual fee and then granted discounts; others required a monthly purchase, etc.2
As David Carter describes, subscription book clubs and similar ‘middlebrow’ endeavors had a distinct ‘dual commitment to culture and to its wider diffusion’.3 Since roughly the middle of the twentieth century until today, these clubs influenced the canon and simultaneously subverted it through the popularization of reading and blurring of cultural categories and boundaries. Mail-order catalogues enabled consumers to shop for books in the comfort of their own home, independent of infrastructure and without having to engage with a bookseller, avoiding judgment of reading preferences or embarrassment because readers felt they were not well-informed. Through book sales clubs, book ownership was transformed into an affordable and attainable goal for millions of people.
The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and went on to become arguably the most successful and certainly one of the longest-lasting mail-order book enterprises in the history of the United States. It has received scholarly attention4 and has also been celebrated in commemorative publications.5 Janice Radway in particular has analyzed the workings and the output of the Book-of-the-Month Club, contextualizing the monthly choices as showing how they ‘represent[ed] the varied output of the publishing industry’.6 Yet none of the previously published scholarship about the Book-of-the-Month Club has dealt explicitly with its selection of translated books.
‘Translation […] represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationship to those with whom we may not have had a connection before’, writes the prizewinning translator Edith Grossman.7 In 1927, an advertisement for the Book-of-the-Month Club stated, ‘everyone who subscribes […] ([…] out of pure self-interest, because of the convenience and enjoyment […]) may have the satisfaction of knowing that, by joining this movement, indirectly he is playing a role in stimulating our literature and deepening our culture’.8 The brochure made no mention of the stimulation of American letters through selection and recommendation of translated works of fiction and non-fiction. But the club was indisputably a ‘cultural phenomenon among the socially ambitious middle classes’, its offerings holding a large appeal for ‘the modernized and increasingly homogenized American bourgeoisie’.9
As this paper will show, translations chosen as ‘Main Selections’ certainly played a significant role, especially in the early years of the club, and contributed to the Book-of-the-Month Club’s overall reputation as ‘the best mail-order bookstore in America’, having ‘expanded the interest in distinguished novels and solid non-fiction’.10
This paper will examine the role of translations among the ‘Main Selections’ of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It will also present information on the source languages for the titles and give insight into the types of titles that were chosen. Due to data availability, this paper will focus solely on the ‘Main Selections’ from the Book-of-the-Month Club’s foundation in 1926 to the year 1973. This information has been compiled by Daniel Immerwahr on his website ‘The Books of the Century’.11 His list of over 700 individual titles has been checked against the list published in Charles Lee’s monograph A Hidden Public, which includes all selections up to 1957.12 Unfortunately, no reliable source was available for the period after 1973.13 The existing list will be analyzed statistically, looking primarily at frequency distribution (translations in general as well as individual source languages) and time-series analysis.14 The overall results will be reviewed and as a case study, the types of books translated from the German and selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club will be analyzed in more detail and contextualized more generally using book historical information about the titles and authors. The Book-of-the-Month Club judges explained their grounds for selection every month in reviews, which were published in the members’ magazine Book-of-the-Month Club News as well as in a leaflet delivered to readers with the selection (cf. figures 2, 3 and 5).15 Luckily, the leaflets can sometimes be found when purchasing original Book-of-the-Month Club editions from antiquarian booksellers.
To better understand the data set, the system that led to a monthly ‘Main Selection’ will be briefly described; Radway and Lee have analyzed this in detail.16 The key elements of Book-of-the-Month Club founder Harry Scherman’s idea were ‘Convenience; reading fulfillment; guidance by experts; continuity’.17 The system of guidance by experts set the Book-of-the-Month Club apart from similar endeavors, since the experts had no stake in the club and did not profit financially from the earnings of the club. The ‘Editorial Board’ was comprised of five public figures with an academic and/or literary background as well as social standing—at least some prospective members would have heard or read the judges’ names before in different cultural contexts. These five judges were identified by the management of the club and worked together to choose ‘the best books as they appear’ from pre-print proofs submitted by
According to club advertisements, the judges were guided by questions such as ‘Has this book real merit, will it be considered readable and interesting and worth-while […]?’19 With this preselection of titles, the Book-of-the-Month Club promised to be the perfect organization for ‘individuals who are anxious to keep au courant with the best of new books as they are published, but who constantly neglect to do so through procrastination or because they are too busy’.20 As Trysh Travis summarizes, ‘[s]ervices such as the Book-of-the-Month Club acknowledged the twin dilemmas of the modern white-collar reader: the inability to keep up with the proliferation of information, and the simultaneous need to do so’.21 In fact, at inception, the club did not offer discounts to their members; the members originally paid the full price for their monthly book—basically paying for the selection process. This was changed later, and impressive discounts were then handed down from the management to the members.22
But even more so, and more importantly for the success of the club, the 1927 introductory brochure explained that Book-of-the-Month Club membership was ideal for ‘persons who live in remote districts, where it is impossible to obtain books except with difficulty’.23 This applied to most Americans, since two-thirds of American counties had no bookstores whatsoever.24 Most Americans did not have direct access to books of any kind, and even if they were able to buy books, they were not offered a selection: ‘in the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels’.25 In the 1930s, there were only approximately 500 dedicated bookstores in the Unites States, predominantly in urban areas, and most of these were ‘refined, old-fashioned “carriage trade” stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities’.26 In 1946, Hutchens wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ‘most of the […] 15,000 [book packages mailed daily] by the Book-of-the-Month Club, go to people in towns of less than 100,000 population.’27
The ‘Main Selection’ was central to the economics of the Book-of-the-Month Club. While members could opt-out of the ‘Main Selection’ and buy an ‘Alternate’ instead, the goal was a relatively high acceptance rate for the ‘Main Selection’ to guarantee economies of scale for printing, distribution and licensing costs. In 1946, Scherman still assumed that ‘Main Selections’ would not be returned by the majority of members, expressing surprise that ‘only 43 per cent of the membership wanted’ the 1945 ‘Main Selection’ Commodore Hornblower by C. D. Forester.28 According to Al Silverman, ‘Main Selections’ were accepted by about 50 percent of the members after World War ii, guaranteeing sales of about 400,000 copies of one title—a star-studded sales figure by any account. Over time, however, the ‘diminishing allure of the Main Selection’ became a core challenge for the Book-of-the-Month Club.29 Silverman shows that the acceptance rate declined rapidly after the 1950s: in 1962, it was at 26.8 percent; in 1972, 17.7 percent; in 1982, 13.5 percent and by the mid-1990s, it had fallen ‘into single-digit figures’.30
Sometimes, beginning from 1931, two books were featured as ‘Main Selection’, as so-called ‘Dual Selections’.31 As Lee explained, ‘Duals’ ‘achieve[d] unexpected combinations of literary variety and favor[ed] the customer with reductions in price […]. At the same time they resolve[d] dilemmas of choice for the judges’.32 The ‘Duals’ often combined a fiction title with a non-fiction title. For instance, in 1939, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars was offered simultaneously with The Brandons by Angela Thirkell.33 In 1942, Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette was paired with Victory Through Air Power by Alexander P. de Seversky.34
Findings in Numbers
On the basis of the list of approximately 730 ‘Main Selections’ over the course of almost 50 years, it can be shown that almost 12 percent of the ‘Main Selections’ were translations from any foreign language. Obviously, the judges on the ‘Editorial Board’ were working with existing translations. From the pool of material made available to them by publishers via the Book-of-the-Month Club, they attempted to find a ‘superior’35 or ‘outstandingly interesting book from the month’s available titles’: ‘readable, rewarding and deserving of the attention of intelligent tastes’.36
That is, they were not acting as acquisitions editors in a publishing house would, looking for foreign, undiscovered talent. In her critique of the market for translations in the Anglophone world (in particular) Edith Grossman emphasizes that availability and visibility are key factors in determining the marketability of a product.37 If publishers did not show interest and make translated literature available, where were the readers—in this case the judges—going to find it? Apparently, the Book-of-the-Month Club worried about this issue, because in February 1929, the Book-of-the-Month Club instated an ‘international advisory committee’ to help select excellent international books, with advisory judges such as H. G. Wells, Arthur Schnitzler and Sigrid Undset. However, as Lee says, the committee ‘failed to function advantageously for the Club’, because ‘the best British and European books inevitably reached the Club’s own committee in American editions’.38 The committee—probably more of a name-lending institution than an actual active element of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection process—was discontinued in 1939 after the outbreak of World War ii.39 The Book-of-the-Month Club did, however, acknowledge three recommendations by advisory judges in this period, two of which were foreign-language titles. For instance, Jean Schlumberger’s Saint Saturnin was recommended by André Maurois (whose book Disraeli had been a Book-of-the-Month in 1928) and chosen in 1932.40
As David Bellos says, ‘Translations from English are all over the place; translations into English are as rare as hen’s teeth.’41 So actually, from today’s perspective, with the three percent glass ceiling that is often assumed for translations in the
Table 2 shows the break-down of source languages by number of titles for the entire period from 1926 to 1973. The top three source languages directly mirror Bellos’ ranking of ‘the most popular source languages for translations […] since
Break-down of individual source languages of originally non-Anglophone ‘Main Selections’
Table 3 depicts the top three source languages German, French and Russian over time, decade by decade. Due to the nature of the data set, the numbers for the 1920s relate to three years (foundation in 1926) and the numbers for the 1970s stand for four years (no reliable data after 1973). At a glance, it becomes blatantly obvious that the overwhelming preference for German all but disappeared after the 1960s—this can be considered a predictable consequence after the two world wars. After 27 originally German-language titles were published from 1926 to 1956, only two originally German-language titles were published from 1957 to 1973. German, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost its appeal—and ‘its status as a world science language on the fall of Berlin in 1945’.47 More interesting, hence, is the development of French and Russian over the decades. Ten titles originally published in French were selected pre-1945; after 1945, eleven titles made the cut, including Swiss francophone author Charles F. Ramuz’s When the Mountain Fell in 1947. The only recurring name among the French authors is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, with two titles (Night Flight in 1932 and Wind, Sand, and Stars in 1939). The interest in originally Russian titles peaked in the 1960s, with four titles, though Russian is rather equally represented in all decades.
Top three source languages over time
Findings in Context
To better understand the types of books that were chosen as ‘Main Selections’ for Book-of-the-Month Club readers, table 4 summarizes the findings for German-language (incl. Austrian and Swiss) authors whose works were chosen as ‘Main Selections’ between 1926 and 1973. The data provided by Immerwahr has been supplemented by information on the original year of publication, the original publisher, and the US publisher. The translator has also been included in the table. All of this data was sourced from national library catalogs (in particular from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalog, but also from the online catalogs of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and Library of Congress).48
Book-of-the-month club: German titles in translation as “Main Selections”
In the first years, up until 1933, the list of selected titles from the German reads like a Weimar Republic bestseller list—books that were very visible to the public through advertising and pre-publication newspaper serialization. Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon (Rowohlt) and Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sargeanten Grischa (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) were both serialized before book publication in the popular Frankfurter Zeitung. 300,000 copies of Zweig’s book were sold by 1933.49 Emil Ludwig’s novels that combined ‘historische Erzählung und Gegenwartsdeutung geschickt miteinander’, were favorites of the time.50 189,000 copies of Ludwig’s biography Napoleon were sold within a year of publication.51
At a glance, the list also underlines the prominent role of Ullstein in the Weimar era: ‘Die besten und modernsten Autoren jener Tage wurden bei Ullstein verlegt. Sie brachten […] ihren desillusionierten, bitteren Nachkriegs-, Nachrevolutions-, Nachinflationshumor und ihren unbesiegbaren flammenden Idealismus.’52 Erich Maria Remarque’s bitter World War i novel Im Westen Nichts Neues can be grouped with Ludwig and Zweig regarding its content, but it is a classic Ullstein success story (Propyläen belonged to Ullstein).53 His novel was serialized before publication in the Vossische Zeitung. It sold about one million copies in Germany in 1929 alone.54 Apparently, this was the second foreign-language title recommended by a member of the aforementioned international advisory committee. Lee says that ‘Thomas Mann brought All Quiet on the Western Front to its [the Book-of-the-Month Club’s] attention before it was published in English’.55 The title sold over 200,000 copies immediately after publication in the United States and provided a ‘disenchanting statement to a people tired of abstractions like glory and honor’.56 Remarque then became a reoccurring name in the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘Main Selection’ list (1946 with Arch of Triumph, 1954 with A Time to Love and a Time to Die).
Felix Salten’s Bambi (Ullstein) is an interesting choice. It was also serialized pre-publication, in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. ‘The American edition was so hotly anticipated that the fledgling Book of the Month Club ordered 50,000 copies before it had even appeared’, writes Paul Reitter.57 According to Nike Pokorn, Thomas Mann recommended the book to Walt Disney.58 Reitter recounts the story differently, saying that the producer and director Sidney Franklin bought the film rights for ‘a live nature film, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Eventually, he sold the rights to Walt Disney’.59 Either way, the 1942 Disney version of Bambi—though quite different from the original novel—can arguably be considered the direct result of its choice and resounding success as a Book-of-the-Month Club ‘Main Selection’.
Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel—another Ullstein book, just like Bambi—was perhaps a more obvious choice. Vicki Baum was the Ellen or Oprah of the Weimar Republic, known as the ‘Weimarer Superfrau’60 as editor of the glamourous Ullstein-magazine Die Dame: she perfectly represented the ‘moderne Frau, die scheinbar ohne Mühe die divergierenden Aufgaben einer Ehefrau und Dame der Gesellschaft, einer Mutter und vielbeschäftigten Schriftstellerin meisterte’.61 The first edition was printed 25,000 times; in 1930 there was already a theater version in Berlin and later a Broadway version.62 Grand Hotel topped the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and was in the top 10 for five months. Her subsequent novel And Life Goes On is a more surprising selection. The New York Times Book Review was less convinced of its merit than the Book-of-the-Month Club judges. The reviewer called it an example of reducing ‘the four-dimensional possibilities of the novel to the two-dimensional thinness of the screen’, adding that ‘Vicki Baum appears not to have progressed from “Grand Hotel” ’.63
Hans Fallada’s novel can perhaps be understood as a prototypical Book-of-the-Month Club book. In interviews with Joe Savago, longtime executive editor at the club, Janice Radway ascertained that the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘tend[ed] to offer its subscribers […] books that “are well-crafted but entertaining”’ with a ‘distinct, literary voice’.64 Popular, but also literary: Stephan Füssel calls Kleiner Mann, was nun? a ‘literarisch überaus gelungene[r], die Wirklichkeit breiter Schichten […] nachzeichnende[r] Roman’.65 Having sold approximately 60,000 copies in Germany alone within a year, the book also touched
From 1933 to 1945 only books by German-language authors in exile were chosen, even books that hadn’t been published in German yet (Koestler, Seghers, Vallentin).67 Jost Hermand states that in this period of time, ‘there was very little interest in publications with a European background’ among
The dominance of the Viking Press is notable. No other publisher has more translations from the German chosen as ‘Main Selections’ in this period between 1933 and 1945. As Hermand says, Viking Press and Knopf are the two publishers most commonly associated with the translations of works by German exile authors. ‘What did succeed in exile was the novel […], which […]—if the authors took up themes that were trendy at the time—promised substantial sales. Therefore, the most successful exile authors were novelists such as Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hermann Kesten, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, and Arnold Zweig, whose works appeared both in German-language editions in exile publishing houses […] as well as in translations published by Alfred A. Knopf and Viking Press.’70 Of the names Hermand lists here, only Hermann Kesten’s and Heinrich Mann’s works were not chosen by the judges as ‘Main Selections’, though Kesten’s Children of Guernica was recommended in the Book-of-the-Month Club News,71 and a book edited by Kesten and Klaus Mann, the anthology The Heart of Europe, was recommended in the Book-of-the-Month Club News as being ‘king size in quantity and quality’.72
Franz Werfel became a favorite of the club, tying with Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque with three titles each picked as ‘Main Selections’ over the decades. The reviews of all the selections, published in the Book-of-the-Month Club News and reprinted as a leaflet and enclosed with the books when they were sent out (cf. for instance fig. 5), reminded readers of past selections73 and encouraged readers to engage with the texts: ‘It is only after meditation on the book or—always better—in talking about it with intelligent readers’, wrote Dororthy Canfield, that we begin to understand the ending of Embezzled Heaven.74 Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh ‘was said to have had a greater sale in ten weeks than any other novel of that year’.75 Irene Nawrocka’s history of the Bermann-Fischer Verlag in exile gives more precise numbers, stating that over 150,000 copies of both Embezzled Heaven and Forty Days of Musa Dagh were sold to
Seghers’ The Seventh Cross is ‘one of the greatest novels of the antifascist resistance against Hitler and an eloquent testimony to the resilience of the human spirit in the modern era.’77 Henry Seidel Canby, chair and speaker of the ‘Editorial Board’, wrote, ‘If you want a picture of Germany, warped, terrible, neurotic, cruel, yet intensely human, read this book.’78 Seghers’ novel was ‘syndicated nationwide as a comic strip, republished in an armed-services edition, and made into a Hollywood film’.79 Interestingly, it was not republished in West Germany until 1962, though over a million copies of the book were sold in the German Democratic Republic.80
Thomas Mann was an obvious choice. As the 1929 Nobel Laureate, he had been welcomed to the
After 1945, well-known and previously selected authors were chosen (Lee calls them ‘[t]ested names’85 ), with Mann and Remarque twice each and Feuchtwanger, who was a close friend of Bertolt Brecht’s and well-known in the US as an exile author. Stefan Zweig fits into this mix quite well. The club used Stefan Zweig’s Balzac to set a new standard: ‘distributed in December 1946’ (just in time for the Christmas season), Zweig’s book ‘was the first title to break through the old arbitrary price limitation’ of three dollars.86
In the period after World War ii, with the exception of recurring exile authors and the Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll (see below), the Book-of-the-Month Club choices translated from German were all non-fiction titles. This coincides with the general trend of club selections: ‘World War II [was] the dividing line, and [after that] nonfiction [was] what the members primarily want[ed]’.87
Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times that West Germany may have ‘achieved a phenomenal economic recovery, but there has been no comparable revival of German literature. […] But, if German artistry in fiction has not been impressive, German skill and industry in writing popular survey of learned subjects have been remarkable.’88 Examples are C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars (an ‘Alternate Selection’ in 195289 ) alongside Paul Herrmann’s book Conquest By Man, ‘a popular mixture of anthropology and history’ and Herbert Wendt’s book In Search of Adam, ‘a popular history of the biological origin and early development of man’. Herrmann was the first new German author to be chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club after World War
Meeghan Smolinsky wrote, ‘the board chose some of the most enduring novels of the century for their monthly reads, including Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Though these novels are considered classics today, much of their circulation can be attributed to their spot on the Book-of-the-Month Club selection list. Authors would give publishing rights to the club, and through distribution to members book sales would be instant and astronomical in comparison to other publishing houses.’92 In 1986, the Book-of-the-Month Club proudly proclaimed that their jury had chosen 26 Nobel Prize winners and 79 Pulitzer Prize winners over the decades. As far as German Nobel Laureates are concerned, however, the judges chose titles by both authors—but after they had received the award. The three titles by Thomas Mann were selected over a decade after his Nobel Prize. Heinrich Böll received the Nobel Prize in 1972, and his subsequent publication, Group Portrait With Lady, was chosen as a ‘Main Selection’ in the following year. The same is true for Norwegian author Sigrid Undset, whose trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter was featured as a ‘Main Selection’ one year after she received the Nobel Prize in 1928.
Conclusions and Outlook
The Book-of-the-Month Club’s success model of catering to and creating a ‘middlebrow’ culture, which has been described in detail by Janice Radway, clearly worked for Anglophone titles as well as translated titles. It can be said for certain that the status as the club’s ‘Main Selection’ guaranteed foreign authors and titles a wide readership and reception, thus offering them a much-needed boost in an otherwise difficult market. With their ‘attention to the variability of readers and reading aims’, the judges ‘produced an evaluative practice […] that was as attentive to minor works of crime fiction as it was to works aspiring to the status of great literature’.93 The diversity of choices applies to the selection of translated books as well, and the judges were obviously willing to take some risks when recommending books by foreign authors. They looked closely at the translations available among new books, and over time, the judges adhered to a general trend that Lawrence Venuti has pinpointed for translations in America, especially after World War
By 1986, judge David Willis McCullough stated that with fiction, there was a ‘nervousness of readers about taking a chance. People want to read authors they’ve heard of’—though he admitted there were exceptions, like in the case of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.95 Nonetheless, over the decades, the ‘Editorial Board’ brought together an eclectic mix, from page-turners to timely non-fiction works and novels by Nobel Laureates. The Book-of-the-Month Club can be credited with putting a number of non-Anglophone authors on the map. For instance, Baum and Remarque became bestselling authors in the Anglophone world, and their books were made into Hollywood blockbusters. Still today, this would be considered a resounding success for any non-Anglophone author.
The role of the Book-of-the-Month Club regarding the promotion of translated works merits further exploration, especially during the years after 1973, supplementing the findings presented here. Also, from 1963 to 2008, the club was financially involved in the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, which was ‘awarded to book-length translations from any language into English […] in recognition of the art of the literary translator—the first American award to do so’.96 The books which received the prize were not ‘Main Selections’ (at least not for the years 1963 to 1973); it would be interesting to see whether the books were chosen as ‘Alternates’ or ‘Dividends’, another category for featured books.97 The discontinuation of the cooperation coincided with Bertelmann’s98 sale of BookSpan, the umbrella company for the Book-of-the-Month Club, to an Arizona-based firm called Najafi Companies in 2008.99 While part of Najafi Cos., ‘Bookspan’s offerings grew to include 19 separate book clubs representing a wide range of genres and literary interests.’100 Since early in 2013, BookSpan has belonged to Pride Tree Holdings, which seems to have been established in November 2012 for the sole purpose of the sale.
Today’s Book-of-the-Month Club bears similarities to the original idea, but also noticeable differences. In any case, it is hard to fully reconstruct the newest history of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Under the direction of Pride Tree Holdings and BookSpan, the club was relaunched in early 2016. While BookSpan’s website101 no longer lists the Book-of-the-Month Club among its clubs, the club clearly belongs to BookSpan according to the Book-of-the-Month Club website. All mail-order Book-of-the-Month Club members were transitioned to the Literary Guild, and the Book-of-the-Month Club now operates on an online-only basis as a monthly hardcover subscription service after a ‘dramatic overhaul’.102
Since the 1990s, ‘new literary institutions [have emerged] which at least superficially resemble aspects of the historical middlebrow’.103 This statement might apply to the relaunched club. The new Book-of-the-Month Club website’s main message is surprisingly similar to Scherman’s original idea, ‘If you’re an avid reader, one thing is for certain: if you only shop the “bestseller” lists, you’re going to miss many of the best stories. That’s why we work hard to bring you the gems: well-written, immersive stories that transport you, give you thrills, and tug at your heartstrings. The books that are truly worth reading.’104 Translations, it seems, are not worth reading today.
Five judges—there are a dozen or so recurring judges, plus guest judges (public figures from the cultural and literary realm such as David Sedaris or Arianna Huffington and even celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Mayam Bialik and Josh Radnor)—each choose one book which is recommended to the club members, so there is a total of five choices each month. Of the 30 books featured between April and September 2016, none are translations. It will be interesting to see how this pattern progresses.
Understandably, the idea of stimulating American literature and bringing the best books to readers certainly means something different in 2016 than it did in 1926. Nonetheless, the fact that the brand lives on in the digital age is a clear indicator of the strength of the Book-of-the-Month Club as a cultural label and popular institution. In any case, the revamped Book-of-the-Month Club offers book historians new options for study and critical observation.105
Translation: ‘an element of security in calculating costs and a respective sales guarantee for high print runs’. U. Schneider, ‘Buchgemeinschaft’, in: Reclams Sachlexikon des Buches, 3rd edition, ed. U. Rautenberg (Stuttgart 2015), p. 75.
Cf. e.g. Schneider, art. cit. (n. 1), p. 75.
D. Carter, ‘Middlebrow book culture’, in: Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, eds. M. Savage & L. Hanquinet (New York 2015), p. 355.
Cf. for instance C. Lee, The Hidden Public. The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (New York City 1958).
Cf. for instance The Book of the Month. Sixty years of books in American Life, ed. A. Silverman (Boston/Toronto 1986) and W. K. Zinsser, A Family of Readers. An informal portrait of the Book-of-the-Month Club and its members on the occasion of its 60th Anniversary (New York City 1986). To a certain extent, Al Silverman’s 1996 contribution about book clubs can also be viewed as a commemorative, or at least memoir-like, history of the Book-of-the-Month Club: A. Silverman, ‘Book Clubs in America’, in: The Book in the United States Today, eds. G. Graham & R. Abel (New Brunswick,
J. Radway, A Feeling for Books. The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill/London 1997), p. 279.
E. Grossman, Why translation matters (New Haven and London 2010), pp. x-xi.
‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan for those who wish to keep abreast of the best books of the day’ (‘The Beginnings of the Book of the Month Club’, [2 November 2013]), in: New York Bound Books, http://www.newyorkboundbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BOMC-brochure.pdf [Accessed 16 September 2016]), p. 4.
J. L. W. West iii, ‘The Expansion of the National Book Trade System’, in: A History of the Book in America, volume 4. Print in Motion. The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, eds. C. F. Kaestle & J. A. Radway (Chapel Hill 2009), p. 83.
S. North, former books editor of the New York World-Telegram and Sun, qtd. in Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 200.
D. Immerwahr, ‘The Books of the Century’, http://www.booksofthecentury.com/ [Accessed 16 September 2016]. Cf. also T. La Force, ‘Books of the Century’, in: New Yorker. Page-Turner, 5 January 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/books-of-the-century.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), pp. 161-94.
Unfortunately, the current owners of the Book-of-the-Month Club (BookSpan, which belongs to Pride Tree Holdings), have not proven helpful regarding archival access. Since early in 2013, BookSpan belongs to Pride Tree Holdings, which seems to have been established in November 2012 for the sole purpose of the sale. David Lazarus of the LA Times recently tried to find out more about Pride Tree Holdings and called it a trip down the corporate rabbit hole: ‘[A]ny corporate entity that goes to this much trouble to remain under the radar clearly doesn’t want any attention. And that’s a very unusual posture for a company with such high-profile consumer businesses.’ D. Lazarus, ‘Book club’s corporate owners are cloaked in mystery’, in: Los Angeles Times (4 September 2014), http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20140905-column.html [Accessed 16 September 2016].
For more insight on using statistical methods for book history research, cf. A. Weedon, ‘The Uses of Quantification’, in: A Companion to the History of the Book, eds. S. Eliot & J. Rose (Chichester 2009), pp. 33-49.
Unfortunately, no complete run of the Book-of-the-Month Club News was available to the author of this paper. Individual issues were purchased from antiquarian booksellers.
In Radway, cf. chapter ‘Reading for a New Class. The Judges, the Practical Logic of Book Selection, and the Question of Middlebrow Style’, in: Radway, op. cit. (n. 6), pp. 261-301. In Lee, cf. chapter ‘Judges and Selection’, in: Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), pp. 107-25.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 29.
‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan …’, op. cit. (n. 8), p. 5.
‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan …’, op. cit. (n. 8), p. 14.
‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan …’, op. cit. (n. 8), p. 5.
T. Travis, ‘Print and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture’, in: Perspectives on American Book History, eds. S. Caspar, J. D. Chaison & J. D. Groves (Amherst/Boston 2002), p. 361.
Radway, op. cit. (n. 6), p. 200.
‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan …’, op. cit. (n. 8), p. 5.
K. C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston 1984), p. 16.
Davis, op. cit., p. 16.
Davis, op. cit., p. 16.
J. K. Hutchens, ‘For Better or Worse, The Book Clubs’, in: New York Times Book Review (31 March 1946), p. 24.
Hutchens, op. cit. (n. 27), p. 28.
Silverman, art. cit. (n. 5: 1996), p. 119.
Silverman, art. cit. (n. 5: 1996), p. 119.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 64.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 64.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 172.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 175.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 109.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 117.
Cf. Grossman, op. cit. (n. 7), pp. 28-9.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 111.
I. Nawrocka, ‘Verlagssitz: Wien, Stockholm, New York, Amsterdam. Der Bermann-Fischer Verlag im Exil (1933-1950). Ein Abschnitt aus der Geschichte des S. Fischer Verlages’, in: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 53 (2000), p. 159.
Cf. Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 111.
D. Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London 2011), p. 210.
Cf. Grossman, op. cit. (n. 7), p. 27.
T. Hale, ‘Publishing strategies’, in: Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Second edition, ed. M. Baker & G. Saldanha (London/New York 2011), p. 218.
L. Venuti, ‘American tradition’, in: Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, op. cit. (n. 43), p. 325.
Bellos, op. cit. (n. 41), p. 216. In his overview of the American tradition of publishing translations, Venuti gives the following listing for top source languages after World War ii: ‘French, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish’. Interestingly, this ranking is not mirrored by Book-of-the-Month Club choices after World War ii due to the low number of titles translation from French and German. Venuti, art. cit. (n. 44), p. 326.
Bellos, op. cit. (n. 41), p. 217.
Bellos, op. cit. (n. 41), p. 12.
Access to the catalogs under: www.dnb.de (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), www.onb.ac.at (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), www.loc.gov (Library of Congress).
S. Füssel, ‘Belletristische Verlage’, in: Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Band 2 Weimarer Republik Teil 2, eds. E. Fischer & S. Füssel (Berlin/Boston, 2012), p. 24.
Translation: ‘historical narration and interpretation of the present interwoven skillfully’. Füssel, art. cit. (n. 49), p. 34.
Füssel, art. cit. (n. 49), p. 34.
Translation: ‘The best and most modern authors of the day were published by Ullstein. They brought their disillusioned, bitter post-war, post-revolution, post-inflation humor and their invincible flaming idealism with them.’ V. Baum, qtd. in E. Schütz, ‘Ullstein-Buchabteilung 1918 bis 1933’, in: Ullstein Chronik, ed. A. Enderlein (Berlin 2011), p. 109.
Schütz, art. cit. (n. 52), p. 104-6.
Füssel, art. cit. (n. 49), pp. 61-2. For more context, cf. e.g. Schütz, art. cit. (n. 52), p. 120-5.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 111.
J. D. Hart, The Popular Book. A History of America’s Literary Taste (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1963), p. 226.
P. Reitter, ‘Bambi’s Jewish Roots’, in: Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2014), http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/618/bambis-jewish-roots/ [Accessed 16 September 2016].
N. K. Pokorn, Post-Socialist Translation Practices. Ideological struggle in children’s literature (Amsterdam 2012), p. 75.
Reitter, art. cit. (n. 57).
E. Gruber, ‘Was wird mein Roman einst sein, ohne daß “einhundertfünfzigtausendstes” drauf steht? Vicki Baums Roman “Menschen im Hotel” und der Ullstein Verlag’, in: Ullstein Chronik, op. cit. (n. 52), p. 179.
Translation: ‘modern woman, who seemed to cope with the diverging tasks of wife and socialite, mother and busy writer effortlessly’. Gruber, art. cit. (n. 60), p. 183.
Füssel, art. cit. (n. 49), p. 61.
s.a., ‘An Emotional Holiday’, in: The New York Times Book Review (6 March 1932), p. 19.
Radway, op. cit. (n. 6), p. 60.
Translation: ‘very well-crafted literary novel which depicted the reality of a broad public’. Füssel, art. cit. (n. 49), p. 35.
Hart, op. cit. (n. 56), p. 249.
Regarding Koestler as a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, cf. C. Morley and L. Fischer in Silverman, op. cit. (n. 5: 1986), pp. 60-3.
J. Hermand, Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile (New York City 2013), p. 208.
Cf. Membership list of the German
Hermand, op. cit. (n. 68), p. 214-15.
Nawrocka, art. cit. (n. 39), p. 159.
Nawrocka, art. cit. (n. 39), p. 160.
Dorothy Canfield wrote in her Book-of-the-Month Club review of Embezzled Heaven, ‘Divining what his life must long have been, we naturally open his new book expecting another of the stories of Nazi oppression, of life-in-hiding, of pursuits, secret police, escapes.’ D. Canfield, ‘Embezzled Heaven. By Franz Werfel’, 1940, leaflet included in Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Embezzled Heaven, private collection [owned by author of paper], p. [1].
Canfield, op. cit. (n. 73), p. [1].
s.a., ‘Franz Werfel, 54, noted author, dies’, in: The New York Times (27 August 1945), p. 19.
Nawrocka, art. cit. (n. 39), p. 160.
H. Fehervary, ‘The Seventh Cross (Das Siebte Kreuz, 1942)’, in: Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Censorship, Revolution, & Writing: S-Z, ed. M. Keith Booker (Westport/London 2005), p. 650.
H. S. Canby, ‘The Seventh Cross. By Anna Seghers’, 1942, leaflet included in Book-of-the-Month Club edition of The Seventh Cross.
Fehervary, art. cit. (n. 77), p. 651.
Cf. Fehervary, art. cit. (n. 77), p. 651.
T. Boes, ‘Aschenbach Crosses the Waters. Reading Death in Venice in America’, in: Modernism/modernity, 2 (2014), p. 429.
Boes, op. cit. (n. 81), p. 443.
Boes, op. cit. (n. 81), p. 443.
Translation: ‘Bruno Frank wrote one of the most beautiful literary biographies ever. Unfortunately, hardly anyone knows about it’. M. Brinkmann, ‘Der herrliche Mensch. Vergessene Autoren’, in: Zeit Online (3 September 2008), http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/36/vergessene-autoren/komplettansicht [Accessed 16 September 2016].
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 189.
Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 79.
Zinsser, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 55.
O. Prescott, ‘Books of the Times’, in: The New York Times (5 November 1956), p. 29.
Cf. Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 187. Janice Radway revisits this book as a club ‘Alternate’ and contextualizes the book within (her) middlebrow reading experience, cf. Radway, op. cit. (n. 6), pp. 331-6.
Translation: ‘The novel “7 vorbei 8 verweht” […] was selected by the powerful American book club “Book-of-the-Month-Club” for March 1955 as their “Book-of-the-Month”. With this decision, the German author is guaranteed a gigantic print run of the American translation of his book. […] Dr. Herrmann is the first inner-German author to have been chosen by the “Book-of-the-Month-Club” after the war.’ s.a., ‘Bestseller’, in: Der Spiegel, 6 (2 February 1955), p. 38.
S. R. Rau, ‘Stranger in Paradise’, in: The New York Times (28 February 1954), p. 106.
M. Smolinsky, ‘A New Reading Experience: Book of the Month Club’ (Fall 2010), http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/BOMC.html [Accessed 16 September 2016].
Radway, op. cit. (n. 6), p. 278.
Venuti, art. cit. (n. 44), p. 325.
D. W. McCullough, qtd. in Zinsser, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 34. Interestingly, regarding foreign literature in translation, McCullough goes on to say that Book-of-the-Month Club readers also had a ‘great fear […] of Latin American fiction’ and its ‘lack of realism’.
On ‘Dividends’, cf. Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 63-4.
Regarding Bertelsmann’s involvement and relationship with BookSpan, cf. e.g. S. Lokatis, ‘A Concept Circles the Globe. From the Lesering to the Internationalization of the Club Business’, in: 175 Years of Bertelsmann. The Legacy for our Future (Gütersloh 2010), pp. 160-61.
L. H. Owen, ‘What’s the Story with BookSpan?’, in: Publishing Trends (24 April 2009), http://www.publishingtrends.com/2009/04/whats-the-story-with-bookspan/ [Accessed 16 September 2016].
Lazarus, art. cit. (n. 13).
BookSpan. http://bookspan.com/ [Accessed 16 September 2016].
J. Milliot, ‘Book-of-the-Month Club Reboots’, in: Publishers Weekly (22 January 2016), http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/69231-book-of-the-month-club-reboots.html [Accessed 16 September 2016].
Carter, art. cit. (n. 3), p. 362.
Book of the Month. About
The Facebook page has about 171,000 likes (status quo: 24 February 2017)—a far cry from 1.6 million members in the 1980s, but the number of likes is on the rise steadily (80,000 in July 2016; 90,000 in August 2016). Cf. data on Book of the Month Club. Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/BookoftheMonth [last accessed 24 February 2017].
