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On the whole, B-o-M's choices have declined in literary worth since the early days. Poor books by name writers (John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane) have found easy acceptance; pure & simple hammock-reading is as apt to get the judges into a bookish tizzy as a Nobel Prizewinner. But with its "dividends," its alternates and the other cut-rate offerings that turn ordinary booksellers purple with frustration, B-o-M is still a sound bargain and many of its choices are beyond cavil.
The Common Touch. Perhaps no man in literary history has so flatly told people what to read and been so readily obeyed as short, mild John William Richard Beecroft. At 49, a Literary Guild hand since 1929, he is the editor of five Doubleday book clubs, personally makes all the selections for memberships totaling some 1,600,000. Like most club editors, he has a squad of screening readers. Virtually unknown to U.S. book buyers, he is a living, prosperous proof that for book clubs it is the common touch that counts. From even the most modest literary standpoint, his choices have about the same lasting values as the average issue of the average women's magazine, probably do no more harm.
All the remaining book clubs together have about one quarter the membership of the B-o-M and the Doubleday string combined. Their major disadvantage is that they are forced to take what the big ones don't want. The Book Find Club, leaning heavily to left-wing selections, has built a membership of about 75,000 on the unassailable claim that the leavings often include the best books. The Peoples Book Club uses Gallup testings and reader-juries to guide the editor in his choice. Its largely rural, largely female (about 85%) membership is reached solely through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, seems well content with bland, kindly love stories, Taylor Caldwell Gothic and even a Thomas Costain novel, Son of a Hundred Kings, after it had been through the Literary Guild wringer.
On balance, the book clubs have no doubt vastly increased the volume of U.S. reading, but it would be hard to argue that they have raised the quality of the books read. Judging from their commercial success, that shortcoming is not apt to be held against them. Certainly not by the little woman.
* Henry Seidel Canby (chairman), Clifton Fadman, Amy Loveman, John P. Marquand, Christopher Morley.