Book Clubs

A Book a Month.

Mass-media and mass-marketing stimulated each other during the 1920s. The most successful publishing development was distribution through book clubs. At the start of the decade most Americans did not have access to bookstores. Many potential members of the emerging reading public did not know what to read or how to obtain books. The founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) by Robert K. Haas and Harry Scherman filled a well-defined need.

Judges.

The monthly selections were chosen by a panel of judges—critic Henry Seidel Canby, columnist Heywood Broun, author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, man-of-letters Christopher Morley, and newspaper publisher William Allen White—who exercised complete freedom to pick any current book that was not priced more than three dollars. The first selection, distributed in April 1926, established the integrity of the judges: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes:...

[The entire page is 611 words long]

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