The Right Book Club: Text Wars, Modernity and Cultural Politics in the Late Thirties

the Books’. With its Swiftian allusions to past conflicts between champions of modernity and guardians of traditionalism, the article reviewed the accelerating war between Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, and its antithesis, the Right Book Club. Of the Left Book Club (LBC), its founder, internal politics, its authors and books together with its iconic importance in late thirties British politics, much is known and continues to be recorded. However, the same statement cannot safely be made about the Right Book Club (RBC). Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the RBC has been written out of the literary history and wider cultural politics of the decade. References to the Club in standard accounts of the period are few and far between, and where they do appear they are either dismissively short or uninformed. As if to confirm this marginal status, while the British Library carries a more or less complete list of the LBC’s publications from its founding in 1936 to its winding up in 1948, the catalogue cites only one item by the Right Book Club. Yet from its launch in 1937, through the twilight years of the thirties and into the war years and beyond, the Right Book Club occupied a distinctive place in the publishing landscape as a locus of conservative values and, just as importantly, as a successful entrepreneurial venture. By the time of its demise in the 1950s having outlasted its chief rival, the RBC, and book clubs generally, had played a major part in extending the literary franchise in Britain and diversifying the nation’s reading habits, leaving a legacy which persists in the present-day business of book clubs and mail-order literary consumption. The concerns of this essay, however, are the RBC’s formative years and