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'Stimulating Our Literature and Deepening Our Culture' Quærendo 47 (2017) 222-251 brill.com/qua ‘Stimulating our Literature and Deepening our Culture’ Translated Books as Book-of-the-Month Club Selections, 1926 to 1973 Corinna Norrick-Rühl Gutenberg-Institut für Weltliteratur und schriftorientierte Medien Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany [email protected] Abstract One of the most prominent book clubs in the US was the Book-of-the-Month Club, established in 1926. The Book-of-the-Month Club marketed books as commodities for consumption, promoting leisurely reading among the growing middle class. But the Book-of-the-Month Club also claimed to be ‘stimulating our literature and deepening our culture’, and in fact, dozens of selected authors went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize for Literature. The body of research on the Book-of-the-Month Club includes Janice A. Radway’s well-known multi-method study A Feeling for Books (1997). But translations among Book-of-the-Month Club selections have not yet been considered. Focusing in particular on books translated into English from German, this paper will present new data on originally foreign-language books that were selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club judges, thereby guaranteeing European authors maximum visibility and exorbitant sales in the US market, which was (and is) usually considered difficult to tap into for non-Anglophone writers. Keywords book sales clubs – Book-of-the-Month Club – translation(s) – German literature Worldwide, millions of readers have accessed their reading material and enter- tainment media through mail-order book sales clubs like Círculo de Lectores, the Nederlandse Boekenclub, Bertelsmann Club or the Book-of-the-Month © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15700690-12341383Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:08:03PM via free access ‘Stimulating our literature and deepening our culture’ 223 Club. Based on a subscription model, book sales clubs offered their members a catalogue of books and other media, often at attractive discounts, or through package deals. Through membership numbers and sales experiences, the book sales clubs had a ‘gewisse Sicherheit in der Kalkulation und eine entsprechende Absatzgarantie hoher Auflagen’.1 Generally speaking, there is a large degree of variation among the structures and subscription models implemented by book sales clubs around the globe over the twentieth and into the twenty-first cen- tury: Some book sales clubs bought licenses for publishers’ titles, selling them to members (often cheaply); other book sales clubs produced their own titles. Some book clubs charged a flat annual fee and then granted discounts; others required a monthly purchase, etc.2 As David Carter describes, subscription book clubs and similar ‘middle- brow’ endeavors had a distinct ‘dual commitment to culture and to its wider diffusion’.3 Since roughly the middle of the twentieth century until today, these clubs influenced the canon and simultaneously subverted it through the popu- larization of reading and blurring of cultural categories and boundaries. Mail- order catalogues enabled consumers to shop for books in the comfort of their own home, independent of infrastructure and without having to engage with a bookseller, avoiding judgment of reading preferences or embarrassment be- cause readers felt they were not well-informed. Through book sales clubs, book ownership was transformed into an affordable and attainable goal for millions of people. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and went on to become arguably the most successful and certainly one of the longest-lasting mail- order book enterprises in the history of the United States. It has received schol- arly attention4 and has also been celebrated in commemorative publications.5 Janice Radway in particular has analyzed the workings and the output of the 1 Translation: ‘an element of security in calculating costs and a respective sales guarantee for high print runs’. U. Schneider, ‘Buchgemeinschaft’, in: Reclams Sachlexikon des Buches, 3rd edition, ed. U. Rautenberg (Stuttgart 2015), p. 75. 2 Cf. e.g. Schneider, art. cit. (n. 1), p. 75. 3 D. Carter, ‘Middlebrow book culture’, in: Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, eds. M. Savage & L. Hanquinet (New York 2015), p. 355. 4 Cf. for instance C. Lee, The Hidden Public. The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (New York City 1958). 5 Cf. for instance The Book of the Month. Sixty years of books in American Life, ed. A. Silverman (Boston/Toronto 1986) and W. K. Zinsser, A Family of Readers. An informal portrait of the Book- of-the-Month Club and its members on the occasion of its 60th Anniversary (New York City 1986). To a certain extent, Al Silverman’s 1996 contribution about book clubs can also be viewed as a commemorative, or at least memoir-like, history of the Book-of-the-Month Club: Quærendo 47 (2017) 222-251 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:08:03PM via free access 224 Norrick-Rühl Book-of-the-Month Club, contextualizing the monthly choices as showing how they ‘represent[ed] the varied output of the publishing industry’.6 Yet none of the previously published scholarship about the Book-of-the-Month Club has dealt explicitly with its selection of translated books. ‘Translation […] represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial ca- pacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationship to those with whom we may not have had a connection before’, writes the prizewinning translator Edith Grossman.7 In 1927, an advertisement for the Book-of-the-Month Club stated, ‘everyone who subscribes […] ([…] out of pure self-interest, because of the convenience and enjoyment […]) may have the satisfaction of knowing that, by joining this movement, indirectly he is playing a role in stimulating our literature and deepening our culture’.8 The brochure made no mention of the stimulation of American letters through selection and recommendation of translated works of fiction and non-fiction. But the club was indisputably a ‘cultural phenomenon among the socially ambitious middle classes’, its offer- ings holding a large appeal for ‘the modernized and increasingly homogenized American bourgeoisie’.9 As this paper will show, translations chosen as ‘Main Selections’ certainly played a significant role, especially in the early years of the club, and contrib- uted to the Book-of-the-Month Club’s overall reputation as ‘the best mail-order bookstore in America’, having ‘expanded the interest in distinguished novels and solid non-fiction’.10 This paper will examine the role of translations among the ‘Main Selections’ of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It will also present information on the source languages for the titles and give insight into the types of titles that were cho- sen. Due to data availability, this paper will focus solely on the ‘Main Selections’ A. Silverman, ‘Book Clubs in America’, in: The Book in the United States Today, eds. G. Graham & R. Abel (New Brunswick, USA/London 1996), pp. 113-27. 6 J. Radway, A Feeling for Books. The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill/London 1997), p. 279. 7 E. Grossman, Why translation matters (New Haven and London 2010), pp. x-xi. 8 ‘The Book-of-the-Month Club. An outline of a unique plan for those who wish to keep abreast of the best books of the day’ (‘The Beginnings of the Book of the Month Club’, [2 November 2013]), in: New York Bound Books, http://www.newyorkboundbooks.com/wp-content/up loads/2013/10/BOMC-brochure.pdf [Accessed 16 September 2016]), p. 4. 9 J. L. W. West III, ‘The Expansion of the National Book Trade System’, in: A History of the Book in America, volume 4. Print in Motion. The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, eds. C. F. Kaestle & J. A. Radway (Chapel Hill 2009), p. 83. 10 S. North, former books editor of the New York World-Telegram and Sun, qtd. in Lee, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 200. QuærendoDownloaded from 47 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2017) 222-251 08:08:03PM via free access ‘Stimulating our literature and deepening our culture’ 225 from the Book-of-the-Month Club’s foundation in 1926 to the year 1973. This information has been compiled by Daniel Immerwahr on his website ‘The Books of the Century’.11 His list of over 700 individual titles has been checked against the list published in Charles Lee’s monograph A Hidden Public, which includes all selections up to 1957.12 Unfortunately, no reliable source was avail- able for the period after 1973.13 The existing list will be analyzed statistically, looking primarily at frequency distribution (translations in general as well as individual source languages) and time-series analysis.14 The overall results will be reviewed and as a case study, the types of books translated from the German and selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club will be analyzed in more detail and contextualized more generally using book historical information about the titles and authors. The Book-of-the-Month Club judges explained their grounds for selection every month in reviews, which were published in the members’ magazine Book-of-the-Month Club News as well as in a leaflet delivered to readers with the selection (cf. figures 2, 3 and 5).15 Luckily, the leaflets can sometimes be found when purchasing original Book-of-the-Month Club editions from antiquarian booksellers. To better understand the data set, the system that led to a monthly ‘Main Selection’ will be briefly described; Radway and Lee have analyzed this in detail.16 11 D. Immerwahr, ‘The Books of the Century’, http://www.booksofthecentury.com/ [Accessed 16 September 2016]. Cf. also T.
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