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Where the clubs get touchy is in the matter of quality. Both the Guild and B-o-M started with brave promises. Early in the game, B-o-M Founder Harry Scherman offered readers "the outstanding book published each month"; in practice, this led to the selection of such books as Rol-vaag's Giants in the Earth, Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. The club's sights have come down a bit. A B-o-M choice is now just a book that the club's five judges* happen to "like very much, for any reason at all." Among books so chosen: The Battle h the Payoff, by Ralph Ingersoll; Inside U.S.A., by John Gunther. But the method, or lack of one, has also given B-o-M customers The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
The Literary Guild has gone through a greater shift. "Literature!—Not Just Books" was the cry in the first number of the Guild's booklet Wings, under Editor in Chief Carl Van Doren. For a while, the Guild tried to find books that "will be permanently important." It chose the work of such writers as Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, Novelists Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Historian Claude Bowers. When Publisher Nelson Doubleday took over in 1934, all that changed. Guild Judge Burton Rascoe gave Guild members ten Doubleday books out of 13 in 1935. That vulnerable policy changed too; nowadays, very few Doubleday books get the Guild nod (two in 1950, none in 1951). But the shining literary promise of the founders has been altered in a private definition of great candor: "A literary standard as high as can be maintained in a mass operation." Most comfortably at home within this formula are a whole succession of bosom-and-bustle historical novels, though the Guild now & then extends its hospitality to such surprised strangers as Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Robert Penn Warren (World Enough and Time).
Matter of Merchandise. Says one bookclub editor who makes no bones about the nature of his business: "We're not missionaries, we're merchandisers." So good are the clubs at merchandising that each successful one has developed its own brand and customers, seldom seriously overlaps any other. By far the best merchandise over the years has come from BoM.
After a quick weed-out by a staff of professional readers, B-o-M's five judges ponder from twelve to 20 manuscripts a month (of the 275 or so to be published). Pollster George Gallup is a member of B-o-M's board of directors nowadays, conducts surveys after the books have been sent out to see "how the members liked them." But Founder Scherman sternly warns against the easy assumption that Dr. Gallup ("He knows more about advertising than any man in the U.S.") influences in any way the judges' choice.