By Robin Macgregor
Many New Worker readers will have on their
bookshelves volumes published by the Left Book Club. Unmistakable in their
bright orange paperback or reddish hardback board format, they will be some of
the 257 titles published between 1936 and 1948 by the London publisher Victor
Gollancz for the Left Book Club (LBC).
1936 was the
year of Franco’s coup against the left government in Spain and Hitler’s
occupation of the Rhineland that made the dangers of fascism increasingly
obvious to neighbouring countries. The LBC was created to promote the cause of
anti-fascism and to oppose the British government’s policy of appeasement.
Appeasement was not just a Tory policy, with fresh memories of 1914–1918 many
on the left would do anything to avoid a repeat of the “War to End War”. The
influential Peace Pledge Union had many members and thought that handing over
France and Poland to Germany was a perfectly acceptable means of avoiding war.
Apart from the international situation, throughout its life the Club addressed
domestic economic and social issues.
The
Man and his Business
Born in 1893 in London to German Jewish parents,
Victor Gollancz was an Oxford Classics graduate who first worked on art books
for publisher Ernest Benn before setting up his own company in 1927.
Here he
attracted established popular authors such as H G Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Daphne
Du Maurier and Edith Nesbit, who welcomed the heavy advertising expenditure
Gollancz undertook. As with his later LBC books, his trade books were
immediately recognised at a distance by their bright yellow dust-jackets.
Traditionally minded book-trade rivals sniffed at his vulgar full page
newspaper advertisements but they paid off handsomely. Before establishing the
LBC he had already added left-wing political and economics to his list. As in the LBC and his business, Gollancz was a hands-on editor, even with
major authors: George Orwell’s snobbish {The
Road to Wigan Pier} was published only with Gollancz’s preface disowning
parts of it. He also wrote personal letters to booksellers promoting books he
strongly liked.
After the demise
of the LBC, the post war era saw the company thrive with a new generation of
authors such as Kingsley Amis, John le Carre and JG Ballard. Knighted in 1965
he died in 1967, active until his death. In 1998 the company was sold to
publishing giant Orion, which maintains the imprint for science fiction and
fantasy.
Gollancz’s own
political views were very changeable but he always had a sometimes
optimistically naïve Christian socialist outlook, drifting, like many of his
generation, from the Liberal to Labour parties. Although never a member, he was
strongly supportive of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) pre-war
anti-fascism, willing to lose one of his best-selling authors when he refused
to publish George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War fantasy Homage to Catalonia. This view changed drastically with the 1939
German-Soviet Pact that allowed the Soviet Union to build its defences. His
1941 The Betrayal of the Left made
clear his anti-communism. Soon after Hitler was soundly defeated he wrote a
pamphlet Our Threatened Values,
which deplored the poor conditions of Germans under the Allied occupation and
which is now a favourite with holocaust deniers.
The
Club
The first book
club was the New York-based Book-of-the-Month Club that was set up by
publishers in 1926 to encourage sales to reluctant book buyers. The technique
was to offer carefully selected (and commissioned) books to match particular
markets, with members ordering at least one book per month. Long print runs of
a limited number of titles allows lower prices, albeit with cheaper bindings
and sometimes with cheaper paper. Gollancz copied this model. Unlike some
clubs, Gollancz took care to ensure that LBC titles were only sold through the
established book trade. This kept bookshops on his side so that they would
still stock his popular fiction and detective stories, which remained his bread
and butter. LBC volumes generally cost two shillings and sixpence (12 pence) in
their cheaper club bindings, but two or three times that for their
traditionally cloth-bound versions. Even LBC books were more expensive than the
sixpenny ‘Specials’ on current affairs from Penguin however, which had been
established as a commercial paperback venture in 1935.
Although the LBC
sought to defend democracy it did not really practice it. Gollancz was the
driving force of the Club, which was founded after an agreeable lunch in a Soho
restaurant. It was he, along with John Strachey and Harold Laski, both leading
left Labour figures, who choose the books. When Gollancz’s interested waned, so
did the Club. Laski was a London School of Economics (LSE) professor who became
Chairman of the Labour Party and Strachey had been a Labour MP who supported
Oswald Mosley until it became clear where he was going politically. Their
support for communist policies and initiatives often put them at odds with the
Labour Party leadership and bureaucracy.
The first
advertisement for the Club’s first book appeared in March 1936. In May it
appeared: France Today and the People’s
Front by the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez. Reckoning the
Club would break even with 2,500 members, the first book had 5,000 subscribers.
By the end of 1936, 20,000 people had signed up necessitating the appointment
of a full-time organiser in the shape of John Lewis, who was in 1971 to publish
its official history: The Left Book
Club: An Historical Record. An LBC rally filled the Albert Hall in
February 1937 and membership reached 44,888 in May.
Rise
and Fall
Its initial success soon inspired a much less
successful Right Book Club, founded in 1937 by London book seller Christina
Foyle, which had a string of retired admirals selecting books. The Labour Party
also set up a Labour Book Service to counter the LBC.
LBC membership
peaked at 57,000 in 1939, but suffered a rapid fall with the Soviet-German
Non-Aggression Pact that allowed the Soviet Union to strengthen is defences.
This came as a shock to the British left and split the Club. Numbers rapidly
declined to 15,000 by 1942. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and
Stalin’s popularity drastically rose, LBC membership nevertheless still
declined slowly. It had 7,000 members when the last book was issued in November
1948. It could be argued that the Club had fulfilled much of its task by 1940
when Dunkirk made it clear that the Nazis were a threat that could not be
ignored or dealt with by diplomacy.
From the
beginning, the strongest support came from the CPGB and its membership. Whilst
the Labour Party leadership sternly disapproved of working with the communists,
this did not prevent thousands of Labour Party members joining and they
provided the bulk of the members after 1939. That did not prevent Labour leader
contributing The Labour Party in
Perspective to the Club’s list.
There are disagreements
on just how working class the membership was. No national trade unions
affiliated but there were active trade union groups. LBC books with engine oil
stains are evidence that some were read in factories during lunch breaks. It
clearly appealed to activists rather the masses. Its peak membership of 57,000
in 1939 was easily dwarfed by a trade union membership of 6,274,000 and sales
of the Labour supporting Daily Herald at
around 2,000,000 copies.
The Left Book
Club soon became more than simply a book club. No less than 1,500 LBC
discussion groups were set up. Summer Schools, speaking tours and specialist
groups such as the Left Book Club Theatre Guild were established, with 250
local amateur groups. Russian language courses and study tours of the Soviet
Union were organised. Local LBC branches knitted scarves for victims of the
Spanish Civil War. Abroad it inspired a similar movement in Australia and some
of its books had the honour of being banned from entering British India.
A monthly
periodical, Left Book News (later Left News), was set to promote and
co-ordinate activity. It allowed remarkably full and frank discussions,
including printing reader’s letters saying some choices were totally
unreadable.
In 2015 the name
and format was revived, but it seems to be devoted to pushing books from a few
left publishers and the Divine Chocolate company.
The
Books
What of the books themselves? They were a mixed bag.
Most were polemical books of the hour, equipping activists with information to
assist in campaigns. These included books with such self-explanatory titles
such as Rudolf Olden’s Hitler the Pawn and Geoffrey Cox’s Defence of Madrid, and Max Werner’s The
Military Strength of the Powers. Lord
Addison’s British Agriculture brought
a bit of class to the Club whereas Sir E D Simon’s The Smaller Democracies came from the pen of a Liberal politician
to demonstrate the breadth of the Club’s support. Some books have proved to be
of lasting value: David Petegorsky’s Left
Wing Democracy in the English Civil War is, decades on, still worth
reading for the subject matter and the more popular A L Morton’s A People’s History of England, although
now very dated, can still be profitably enjoyed and Ellen Wilkinson’s study of
unemployment in Jarrow, The Town That
Was Murdered, has attained classic status.
There were a
number of popular educational titles such as Alan Beck’s Chemistry: a Survey and Richard Acland’s Public Speaking. For lighter relief there was The Left Song Book. When the course of
the war turned and for the few post-war years of the Club, it devoted its
energies to books such as Gaetano Salvemini’s and George La Piana’s What to do with Italy and less urgent
works on contemporary problems such as the second last title, Franz Zweig’s Men in the Pits. The
books were generally plain and unillustrated. The only real exception to this
was JF Horrabin’s Atlas of Empire, and
even it had basic black and white line drawings.
A full list of the
Club’s output will be found in John Lewis’s official history mentioned above.
