Holland House Books

Recommended! - Nicola Wilson

BeforeReese Witherspoon and Zoella's Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richardand Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This isthe story of Britain's first celebrity book club and the judges who changed howwe read. For forty years between1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail outone book a month - fiction, history, travel, or biography - to subscribers in overthirty countries. The judges established what a good 'book club book' lookedlike: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time andmoney in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they starteda revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelvestoday. HughWalpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden werethe literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives,affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal andprofessional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war. They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and thegrowth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War,and World War Two. Recommended!exploreshow a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever howwe buy and think about books.

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