The Left Book Club

Abstract

In the Britain of the nineteen-thirties it was easy to identify a leftwing, anti-fascist, pro-Soviet, anti-war, popular-front intellectual. The sign of identification was not necessarily a party card, a lapel button, or a signature at the bottom of a revolutionary manifesto, but the colour of the bindings on his bookshelves. This was neither red nor pink, but the omnipresent orange of the limp, cloth-bound volumes published by the Left Book Club. For in the thirties the Left Book Club became the giant umbrella under which most progressive, left-wing activists found shelter. The first proposal for a Left Book Club was made in May I935, when John Strachey was asked by a representative of the Workers Bookshop, the foremost communist bookseller in London, to 'sit on the selection committee of a Left Book Club which was to choose books from any publisher's list'.1 The bookshop devised and circulated to those already publishing left-wing volumes a plan for supplying books. The response was disheartening. All these publishers refused to put up any capital for the venture, and only Victor Gollancz accepted the scheme. No further progress was made on the proposal until Gollancz revived the idea in early 1936. Gollancz and Strachey were called to a meeting organized by