Sometimes there comes along a book you never even hoped you’d get to read – something so totally up your street that it feels almost like a personal kindness that the author was willing to write. Such is Recommend! (2025) by Nicola Wilson – subtitled ‘the influencers who influenced how we read’. It is a history of the Book Society, which began in 1929 as one of the UK’s first book-of-the-month clubs, and went on for many more decades.
The idea was simple: notable authors of the day would read advance copies of books and pick a choice for their growing number of subscribers. If they didn’t want that, there would be alternatives they could substitute in. Each book would come with the Book Society News, including reviews and articles. The everyday, normal reader could have what highbrow literary groups had had for generations. They even had a ‘literary club’ in London that any subscribers were welcome to visit and use, though who knows how many did. Forgive a long quote, but I enjoyed this aspirational look at what a dinner between five literary minds could and would turn into:
For as the red wine was served out, followed by whiskey and cigars for the men, cigarettes for the ladies, the writers’ plans began to take shape: month by month, book by book, they’d change how people thought about reading. As judges their tastes would be broad and eclectic, embracing popular genres and literary fiction, as well as history, travel writing, and memoir. They would not take themselves too seriously; books should be enjoyable and for everyone. By supporting new authors and encouraging a habit of book-buying, they’d break the back of the private subscription library market, enabling ordinary, busy people to build their own collections of first editions. They would help those without nearby bookshops to keep up with new writing and ideas, creating a wide Anglophone reading community. Their selections and recommendations will be bestsellers, making publishers, agents, and booksellers take note. They’d shake up the staid book world with their expert advice, allowing wider audiences, with a growing appetite for books, better access to a world from which many felt actively excluded
Along the way, they would gain enemies. Personal attacks and jibes about their integrity would haunt them, threatening to topple their careers. They would be accused of dumbing down, mocked as ‘middlemen’ for ‘conferring authority on a taste for the second-rate’. Not all five would stick it out. But the Book Society they began that night would serve tens of thousands of readers worldwide for the next forty years, steering a course through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the devastation of World War II. Hundreds of what we now think of as twentieth-century classics would first reach readers wrapped in ‘Book Society Choice’ yellow bands.
The initial group included names still known today. The head of the selection committee was Hugh Walpole; alongside him was J.B. Priestley and Rose Macaulay, though the latter dropped out before the first novel was published. Replacing her was Clemence Dane (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton), and the others on that initial committee are perhaps less remembered – writer and reviewer Sylvia Lynd and academic George Gordon, lending the group some critical respectability. Later judges who get a lot of space in the book include Cecil Day-Lewis and Edmund Blunden.
Wilson takes us through the set up of the group, its advertising and some initial pushback, and how the first books were chosen – which seems not to have been plain sailing. ‘For Hugh, the club’s first choice was a mess’, she writes. His father died in the midst of the decision making, and so he had to leave it to others – who were debating between Helen Beauclerk’s The Love of the Foolish Angel and Joan Lowell’s non-fiction The Cradle of the Deep. The former was chosen – which turned out to be a relief, as Lowell’s book was exposed as a hoax.
The book is structured chronologically, but with different judges taking centre stage at different times. I was a little sceptical about this at first – after all, if we delve into Hugh Walpole’s life (for instance) only for the initial chapter, then how would Wilson deal with significant things happening to him later? How would it work to only learn depths about Sylvia Lynd in chapter four? Well, and not for the last time, I’m very impressed by Wilson’s handling of her material. Somehow, it works. She expertly manages to assess when we really need to learn more about a judge’s personal life – whether that be affairs and divorce, substance abuse, or merely the shifting literary fortunes that gave them more or less time to devote to the Book Society. It works brilliantly, and Recommended! becomes rather a page-turner.
I’m skimming the surface of the details in here (you’ll just have to read it!) but, to be honest, I’d have been captivated if Recommended! were only an account of the mechanics of starting and running a book-of-the-month club. And it’s so much more. Wilson doesn’t tell us about every single choice at length, there are plenty of satisfyingly detailed sections exploring why books were chosen, what that did to their reputation, who squabbled with whom, etc. And the choice of titles is certainly varied. While book-of-the-month clubs now tend towards popular, pacey fiction, the Book Society were unafraid to recommend hefty history books – and, indeed, many of the leading highbrow writers of the day.
I said it on Tea or Books? when mentioning Recommended! and I’ll say it again – I was blown away by Wilson’s research. I wrote about the Book Society for my DPhil and spent quite a lot of time researching it – and I know how extremely difficult it was to find any information. It was a struggle even to find a list of the books they chose, and indeed I failed to find a complete list – but Wilson has found far, far more. The newsletters, the relevant correspondence, the detailed understanding of the judges’ lives throughout the decades – there is so much expert research presented in an engaging way, and it never feels like anything is missing. It is extremely impressive, and I doff my cap to Wilson.
While the Book Society continued until the 1960s, Wilson’s book takes us up to the end of the Second World War, with a postscript and some appendices covering the later years – which is rather a relief, to be honest, as we could stay in the heyday. The only thing missing from this exceptional book is a full list of titles as an appendix – they are listed at the ends of chapters, but that does require quite a lot of flicking about, and I’d have preferred to have a full list to consult.
The Book Society may never have numbered millions of subscribers, but it truly changed the way that society – or a certain section of society, at least – chose and read their books. It could have been a curio of literary history, left to explore in the shadows by students like me. I’m so glad that Wilson has rescued The Book Society from that fate with this captivating, fascinating book that garlands its incredible research with an approachable chattiness. In conclusion: Recommended! is heartily recommended.