Before Reese Witherspoon and Zoella's Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This is the story of Britain's first celebrity book club and the judges who changed how we read. For forty years between 1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail out one book a month - fiction, history, travel, or biography - to subscribers in over thirty countries. The judges established what a good 'book club book' looked like: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time and money in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they started a revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelves today.

Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden were the literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives, affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal and professional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war. They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and the growth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, and World War Two.

Recommended! explores how a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever how we buy and think about books.

About the Author

Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading, co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and a founding director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project.

Her research is in the history of reading, book history, and working-class writing. Her first book was Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Routledge, 2015) - reviewed in the TLS as an important contribution to the study of working-class writing - and she is co-author of Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

She has edited three academic books including The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024), edits an Elements strand for Cambridge University Press on 'Women, Publishing, and Book Cultures', and over many years has worked to get the writings of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth back into print.

Nicola grew up in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. She now lives in Pershore, Worcestershire with her partner and two children.

Reviews

'A deeply researched, stylishly written piece of narrative history, full of detail and telling vignettes. The organisation - around the five characters at the heart of the Book Club - works wonderfully, giving an emotional richness to the story. An enormous pleasure to read, while also deepening immeasurably my understanding of the literary business of the interwar period out beyond the well-walked squares of Bloomsbury.' Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the

Book Information
ISBN 9781739104757
Author Nicola Wilson
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Holland House Books
Publisher Holland House Books