The Battle for Britain’s First Book of the Month Club
Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.
In October 1929 thousands of members of Britain’s Book Society received a new hardback through the post. Whiteoaks, by an unfamiliar Canadian writer, Mazo de la Roche, was the seventh monthly ‘choice’ of the society, Britain’s first subscription book-of-the-month club, begun in April that same year. The novel confirmed the club’s taste for entertaining page-turners; books that were worth investing time and money in, though not too complex or ‘highbrow’. ‘No selection that the Book Society has made has given me so much pleasure as this one’ wrote the head of the selection committee, bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole, in the Graphic.
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