Left Book Club

The Left Book Club, founded in 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and 1940s in the United Kingdom. The book club, run by Victor Gollancz, supplied a book chosen every month by Gollancz and his panel — he, Harold Laski and John Strachey — to its members, who by the outbreak of the second world war numbered 57,000, many of whom participated in one or other of the 1,500 or so Left Discussion Groups scattered around the country. The books and pamphlets with their distinctive orange (paperback 1936-38) or red (hardback 38-48) covers with their legend - NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC - sold for 2s 6d to members. Many titles were available for sale only in the LBC edition, with monthly 'choices' received by all members, with additional optional titles reprinting current socialist and 'progressive' classics. The volumes included history, science, reporting and fiction and covered a range of subjects, but all with a left-leaning slant. Among the authors of its 200-plus volumes were Arthur Koestler, André Malraux, George Orwell, Katharine Burdekin and Clement Attlee.

Until the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 (and indeed for some time afterwards), the club’s output included many authors who were members of the Communist Party or close to it, and it avoided any criticism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, refusing Orwell’s "Homage to Catalonia". Indeed, it published some extraordinary encomiums to the wonders of Stalinism, among them Dudley Collard’s "Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others" (a defence of the show trials), Pat Sloan’s "Soviet Democracy" (a propagandist tract extolling Stalin’s 1936 constitution), a reprint of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s "Soviet Communism: a new civilisation", J. R. Campbell’s "Soviet Policy and its Critics" (notable for its virulent assault on Trotsky) and Hewlett Johnson’s "The Socialist Sixth of the World".

By early 1940, however, Gollancz had broken with the CP, a process documented in the articles collected in "Betrayal of the Left" in early 1941, and from then on the club took a strongly democratic socialist line until its demise in 1948. Despite its large membership and popular success the Book Club was always a huge financial drain on the publisher, with the advent of paper rationing at the onset of the war the club was restricted to just one monthly title. To replace the book club's additional choices and augment the LBC selections, Gollancz launched the "Victory Books" series, a series of shorter monographs available to the general public, including two of the biggest sellers of the War "Guilty Men" by Cato (Michael Foot) and "Your M.P." by Gracchus (Tom Wintringham).

In addition to books the LBC also produced a monthly newsletter - with began as a simple club news sheet "Left Book News", but gradually developed into a key international political and social affairs paper (as "Left News").

Gollancz was a notoriously interventionist editor. He published Orwell’s "The Road to Wigan Pier" but insisted on prefacing its account of working-class life in the north of England with an introduction disowning its criticisms of middle-class socialists who had little understanding of working class life and later republished the book leaving out the second part of which he disapproved.

A small group of booksellers in the UK are working on bringing back a publishing version of the Left Book Club and established a Limited company of the same name in 2002, their site LeftBookClub.com was launched in 2007, where they are documenting progress.

References and external links

*Lewis, John. "The Left Book Club: an historical record". Gollancz. 1970. ISBN 0-575-00586-6
*Laity, Paul (ed). "The Left Book Club Anthology". Gollancz. 2001. ISBN 0-575-07221-0
*Edwards, Ruth Dudley. "Victor Gollancz: a biography". Gollancz. 1987. ISBN 0-575-03175-1
*http://www.wcml.org.uk/culture/lbcbooks.htm - List of publications
*http://www.leftbookclub.com - new publishing project