A Feeling for Books

The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire

Janice A. Radway

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807863978
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

PART ONE In The Service Of The General Reader

CHAPTER ONE A Certain Book Club Culture

A DESIRE CALLED NEW YORK

It may have been simple anxiety. Or the weight of layered memories evoked by the familiar geography. Whatever the cause, I was not thinking about my impending appointment at the Book-of-the-Month Club as the 7:32 Amtrak commuter from Philadelphia crawled across the marshy plain outside Newark on its journey into New York's Penn Station. What I was thinking about, I recall, was New York itself. My memories were triggered by the train's slow progress past the park-and-ride lot my dad and I had used the summer we commuted together into “the city.” I was twenty then and working at TWA as a reservations agent. Remembering those companionable journeys, I recalled countless other Hudson River crossings that had punctuated my New Jersey childhood. Each conjured intense, highly sensuous memories: the spangled magnificence of the New York skyline at Christmas, the city dazzling, as if deliberately bedecked for the season; the ripe, fetid smell of the fruit stands on Eighth Avenue on a hot August afternoon; the deeply shadowed midtown canyon looking up Broadway from Macy's; the recollected shock of happening on a single maple turned scarlet on an October Saturday, triumphant amidst miles of concrete. The images now seem impossibly romantic. The predictable result, I suppose, of a suburban childhood defined in countless ways by a desire called New York.

Significantly, each image was connected in my mind with an exhilarating pilgrimage to the city at the side of one of my parents or grandparents to see the Christmas pageant at Radio City Music Hall; Broadway musicals such as My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, and The Sound of Music; the Museum of Natural History; or my father's office in the building that housed the New York Daily News. In the lobby of the building an enormous silver globe was suspended, meant to be a symbol, I suppose, of the paper's reach and importance. For me New York was something other than the financial capital of the world; it was, quite simply, its cultural center — a magnet whose irresistible force captured my youthful attention and forever after defined my ambition.

At the time of that particular train ride from Philadelphia, though, to talk with people at the Book-of-the-Month Club, I did not connect these memories with the task at hand. They seemed mental distractions only, ways of controlling my mounting apprehension about the impending meeting with company officials. I was traveling to the club's Manhattan offices in April 1985 to try to persuade its executives to allow me to investigate the way their members bought and read books. The task seemed simply professional, lacking any clear connection to the private details of my personal past. However, countless conversations over the next three years with Executive Editor William Zinsser, the man I was scheduled to meet, and with his editorial colleagues at the club would teach me to recognize that the project was deeply tied to these intensely resonant memories of the city. Those conversations would teach me to see in the editors’ cultural sophistication and in the understanding they accorded their aspiring “general readers” the meaning of my own desire to possess the promise held by New York. The defining power of a longing for the knowledge secreted away in New York's museums and libraries, on its stages, in its skyscrapers, in “the Village,” and on the East Side revealed itself to me gradually in the mirror of the editors’ similar desires, which apparently also drew each of them to New York's publishing houses and eventually to the Book-of-the-Month Club. Six more years in dusty archives and hushed libraries on the ghostly trail of Harry Scherman, the club's founder, would additionally reveal the precise historical sources of our shared wish for cultural mastery and the prestige that seemed to accompany it — a wish, I discovered, the Book-of-the-Month Club itself had been created to address. When I finally saw myself and the editors most clearly in the reconstructed image of Scherman's first subscribers, who had responded with hope and no doubt a certain amount of insecurity to his 1926 promise to deliver to them automatically “the best new book published each month,” I understood fully for the first time that this project was defined as much by my own earlier longing for a life marked by books and the mysterious promise of Culture, with that authoritative and daunting capital C, as it was by the analytic impulse to make sense of an institution called the Book-of-the-Month Club.

THE BOOK CLUB OF RECORD

I carried with me neither this self-knowledge nor this reflexive understanding of what was still an inchoate project as the Silver Meteor eased its way into Penn Station that crystalline morning in April. My thoughts focused rather more nervously on what I might say to William Zinsser about my academic credentials and about my interest in the organization. What had led me to take the train that morning was an essay on reading written by the club's chairman, Al Silverman, which he had engagingly titled “The Fragile Pleasure.”¹ I was impressed by the way Mr. Silverman evoked the particular magic of being immersed in worlds etched by words. But I was also pragmatically alerted to the fact that the Book-of-the-Month Club might harbor a lot of information about readers and reading, a topic that had become the focus of my academic research. Having just published a book about how a group of women read romances differently from the way those books were read by their many critics, I wanted to know more about divergences in the ways people acquired, read, and used books. The Book-of-the-Month Club looked like the perfect site for my next research project.

I remember mentally rehearsing this explanatory narrative and self-justification as I searched for the club's offices in midtown New York at Lexington Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Expecting only the typical mauve, gray, and glass corporate reception area of 1980s New York as the elevator doors slid open, I was momentarily stunned to find myself in a room clearly designed to evoke a book-lined study. Too neat, ordered, and regimented to be the library of an actual reader, it reminded me of a stage set or of that restaurant across the Hudson in Tenafly, New Jersey, that my parents liked, which accompanied its English prime ribs with lots of wood, a few strategically placed, fake books, and the kind of reading lamps you see in pictures of old libraries. Although the books in the club reception area were real, they, too, seemed to have been assembled for effect. When I was asked by a young woman partially hidden behind an obviously tasteful bouquet of spring flowers to wait for Mr. Zinsser, I made a mental note of the deliberate symbolic care with which the room had been organized. Callers to this establishment were obviously meant to be impressed by its understated elegance, by its attention to the literary, and by the meticulously displayed collection of every Book-of-the-Month Club selection since 1926. Bill Zinsser emerged quickly, greeted me cordially, and then escorted me back to his office past a Norman Rockwell-like portrait in oils of the club's first judges. The picture's prominent placement seemed meant to establish that here was a Cultural institution, and one with an illustrious past at that.

My notes from that first exploratory conversation with Bill Zinsser are not terribly detailed. I wrote only that he was “fiftyish,” distinguished-looking, and dressed “like an academic in tweed coat and dress slacks.” I noted as well that he was in charge of “special projects” and that he edited the club's catalog, the Book-of-the-Month Club News. Perhaps I thought the interview wouldn't amount to much. Zinsser certainly didn't promise me the access I was seeking. Or perhaps I was too afraid to hope that it had gone as well as I thought it had. I didn't record much else except to say that I liked Bill Zinsser immediately and that I thought it surprising that we seemed to have so much in common. We were, after all, from different worlds, weren't we?

Looking back, I see more clearly that despite my effort to be open-minded and receptive, unquestioned assumptions about the separation between “academics” and people in publishing had led me to assume that Zinsser and I would necessarily be very different. I had been surprised to discover that before his arrival at the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1979, Zinsser had taught writing at Yale and served as master of the one of the residential colleges there. More strikingly, he also fully understood the kind of ethnographic research I was proposing, since his wife was at that moment completing a Ph.D. in education at the University of Pennsylvania, with an ethnographic dissertation on the acquisition of literacy. Still thinking of myself as an academic and of those at the book club as somehow fundamentally different — less intellectual perhaps, and more involved in commerce, certainly — I had been surprised that he did not seem at all wary about my motives or intentions. It would take many more discoveries of similar convergences between my own past and those of the club's editors before I began to see how similar we were in certain key ways and to recognize that those similarities had a good deal to do with what we had all made of the middle-class educations we were privileged enough to receive. In time those similarities would also point up the significance of the fact that our habitual treatment of books differed in crucial ways.

During this particular conversation, however, Zinsser managed to convey to me his own enthusiasm for what he called the Book-of-the-Month Club's important educational work and to suggest that our jobs were not that different. Known for his influential book, On Writing Well, Bill had been brought to the club by Al Silverman to be the in-house editor of all the organization's publications. He was also to oversee special projects of an educational and public-spirited nature that he and Al felt were important to the club's role as a cultural institution. The two men shared the same high aspirations for the club, and it was obvious that Bill greatly admired Al's values. In this particular conversation, Bill observed with a slightly ironic note of institutional pride and simultaneous self-deprecation that they liked to think of themselves as “the book club of record.” I thought later on the ride home that this seemed to be a reference to the New York Times, and as such, it was meant to suggest that the club possessed parallel cultural authority.

Despite this transparent effort on my part to maintain the slight disdain and distance of traditional academic analysis (wasn't I intellectually clever enough to recognize pretentiousness and too-deliberate tastefulness when I saw them?), my notes nonetheless enthusiastically convey the sense of rapport I felt with Bill Zinsser and a quite fervent hope that the whole thing might work out. Zinsser promised only that he would talk to Al Silverman in order to explain to him what I was proposing and to suggest that he meet with me himself sometime in the future. I returned to Philadelphia wondering only what I could do next if this research initiative failed.

Within a week I received a letter from Al Silverman inviting me back to New York for lunch with him and Lorraine Shanley, the executive vice-president of the Book-of-the-Month Club and one of the founders of the Quality Paperback Book Club. That meeting, at a remarkably formal East Side restaurant serving huge steaks and whole broiled fish to business lunchers, also seemed to go well, at least from my perspective. I found I could talk as easily to Al Silverman and to Lorraine Shanley as to Bill Zinsser, in large part because words and books occupied a central place in all our lives. We talked a good deal, I recall, about recent bestsellers, about changes in the publishing business, and about the continued prominence of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Prompted by Al to explain what I had in mind, I suggested that although I eventually wanted to investigate the many ways in which their subscribers read, first I would need to conduct an exploratory, pilot study of the club's editorial organization in preparation for writing a grant proposal. I would need a grant, I observed, to underwrite the costs of a full year's worth of work in the Manhattan editorial offices, at the club's distribution operation in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and with some of the membership. At that point, I conceptualized the larger study as focusing on the intersection between the club and its membership, with the ultimate goal of assessing the different ways Book-of-the-Month Club members used and read their books. Wryly suggesting that he, too, would like to find out what their members actually did with their books — the first, disturbing hint that the club did not know as much about its readers as I had hoped — Silverman noted that he was predisposed in my favor by his conviction that cultural institutions had a social responsibility to be open to scholarly research. He promised to think about my project and to get back to me.

Almost immediately he extended an invitation to visit the club's offices throughout the summer of 1985 for purposes of studying the in-house editors’ evaluation and selection of alternate books for its membership.² He promised further that if I received a grant, I could continue my research in the future. Bill Zinsser, Silverman explained, would serve as my contact at the club. He would be the one to introduce me to others, the one I should apply to with specific requests. Thrilled that gaining access had proved to be so easy, I called the next day to set up my first research appointment with Bill Zinsser. I had no idea, at that point, that matters were a good deal more complex than they appeared on the surface, nor did I see that the issue of access was not then, or ever would be, fully settled.

Looking back on the course this project has taken, I realize how utterly dependent it has been on Al Silverman's genuine sense of social and cultural responsibility as well as on Bill Zinsser's openness to establishing some sort of relationship with me. I suspect that it was their intellectual interest, curiosity, and commitment to what they were doing that prompted them initially to become advocates for my project. For advocates they clearly became. Al Silverman impressed this upon me in extending the invitation to spend the summer in the club's offices. Bill's enthusiasm for what I wanted to do, as well as his ability to explain its academic purposes, Al suggested, had convinced him that my aim was not to write an exposé of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Nor was I likely to take up a simple, dismissive position on the club's selections, given the nature of my first book on romances. Bill apparently had explained to Al and to Lorraine Shanley that Reading the Romance had taken popular literature seriously. As a consequence, Al asked Bill to introduce me to his colleagues and to make suggestions about who I should approach first for information.

At the time I had no real idea of what Bill thought of me. Later we developed a relationship close enough to enable us to reveal to each other at least some of our hopes, worries, and fears about our professional lives. I think Bill enjoyed talking to me as much as I enjoyed talking and laughing with him. In fact, like virtually everyone else I met at the Book-of-the-Month Club, Bill Zinsser was very, very funny. He delighted in turning a crisp, witty eye on books, authors, cultural habits, and anyone who might take herself too seriously. He had no patience with pretentiousness and pomposity, especially among academics.

In spite of the discomfort Bill's stories sometimes provoked, I developed great affection for him and for his ability to expose the foibles of the academic world. Despite the warmth that developed between us, however, I would characterize the relationship as collegial rather than as intensely personal. It seems important to acknowledge this openly here because I think the nature of the somewhat formal but affectionate friendship that developed between us set a pattern for the connections that evolved later with other editors at the club. My relationships with them were confined to, and limited by, our professional connection over the nature of their daily work. The fact that those interactions necessarily developed amidst endlessly ringing telephones and in short intervals between the recurrent meetings and conferences that comprise upper middle-class professional work in the contemporary United States both controlled the nature of our relationship and constantly underscored the fact that it was entirely dependent on the editors’ willingness to be interrupted.

In spite of the developing goodwill, though, certain things worried me. I fretted in my field journal about my growing affection for Bill, Al, and Lorraine. Mistrustful of my feelings of identification with them, I wondered how this sense of connection would affect my ability to be analytical about what I saw. The thing that gave me real pause, however, was a copy of the memo Bill circulated to the rest of his colleagues introducing me and explaining my impending presence at the upcoming Thursday morning editorial conference. I was grateful that Bill was willing to share it with me. But I was also puzzled by an allusion I could not explain. I quote the memo here in its entirety:

July 10, 1985

TO: The Editors

FROM: Bill Zinsser

I'll be bringing to this Thursday's meeting Janice Radway, professor of American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who is embarking this week on a scholarly study (eventually to be a book) of reading habits in America, using the Book-of-the-Month Club and its methods as her model. Her last book, “Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature,” a study of women who read romance novels, got an admiring full-page review in the NYTBR last winter. Anyone interested in the book can borrow my copy. She is also editor of “American Quarterly,” the scholarly journal in her field.

I've talked with Janice at length about her project (Al and Lorraine have also talked with her) and I think the collaboration will be a pleasant and fruitful one for all of us in a number of ways. She will want to talk with you about your work as she gets into her research. You will enjoy the quality of her mind; her questions, unlike some that have been asked of you lately, are enjoyable and even understandable.

BZ³

Clearly, Bill had positioned me on the side of the editors, but against whom? Who else had been asking questions of them and why? Also, he had suggested that the editors themselves might get something out of their interaction with me. But what did he have in mind? Definitely troubled that Bill's move clearly compromised my distance from them — I was more confident then about my ability to maintain this — I worried that I was being presented as their ally in a conflict I had neither detected nor understood. His memo summoned an ill-defined yet adversarial presence, an inquisitor like me, but one Bill defined as irritating and obscure. When I asked him about the identity of this individual, he said only that he was referring to managers from Time, Inc., the corporate owner of the Book-of-the-Month Club, who had been sent to the club's offices recently to gather information about its structure, operations, and profitability. When he referred to them as “MBA-types,” I relaxed some and acquiesced a little too happily at being ranged against them.

Time, it seemed, had purchased the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1977 but had done nothing to integrate the club into its own massive bookselling operation. Bill worried out loud that these interviews suggested that something new was afoot. He assured me, though, that this would not have an impact on my own research. Comforted, I did not react with the alarm I should have. Instead, I thought a good deal about the suddenly obvious difference between talking with a group of romance readers, whose education and access to writing was quite distinct from my own, and this new situation of “studying up,” that is, working within an organization peopled by individuals with linguistic, social, and communication resources comparable to those of the academic investigator.⁴ Evidently I would have to deal much more regularly with my interlocutors’ characterizations and manipulations of me as well as, possibly, with their outright disagreements and opposition to what I might write. A little more wary then than I had been only a few days before, I sat in on my first editorial meeting at the Book-of-the-Month Club on July 11, 1985.

CULTURAL FINESSE AND AN ENTHUSIASM FOR SENTIMENT

These editorial meetings were held every Thursday morning in the club's elegant conference room.⁵ Like the reception area, this room was lined by polished wooden bookshelves laden with club selections. At the entrance, enshrined in a small, lighted cabinet, were a few volumes from founder Harry Scherman's Little Leather Library, twenty-five-cent copies of the classics that Scherman sold at Woolworth's and by mail order before he created the Book-of-the-Month Club. The organization's institutional awareness of its history and position was further demonstrated by framed prints of several New Yorker cartoons gently gibing the club and its social-climbing members. More often than not, a lavish floral centerpiece graced the table, testimony to the fact that the club's official judges, the individuals responsible for the monthly main selections, had recently dined in the room...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Feeling for Books
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE In The Service Of The General Reader
• PART TWO On The History Of The Middlebrow
• PART THREE BOOKS FOR PROFESSIONALS
• AFTERWORD
• NOTES
• SOURCES CITED
• INDEX