PUBLISHING: Mass-Produced Culture

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Start a Parade. That title is now claimed by Doubleday's Literary Guild (one of its four clubs), with a reported 1,000,000 members. Doubleday intends to keep its lead. The Guild will be plugged in Montgomery Ward & Co.'s new spring catalogue, along with Doubleday's Dollar Book Club (its 500,000 members get reprints of best-sellers).

This move will bring Montgomery Ward into the literary territory which its old competitor, Sears, Roebuck & Co., has staked out. When goods became scarce during the war, Sears teamed up with Simon & Schuster and Chicago's Consolidated Book Publishing Co. to form he People's Book Club.

By concentrating on Sears's farm customers, P.B.C.'s President Leon Shimkin, ailed Simon & Schuster's "Third S," has run P.B.C.'s membership up to 300,000 fourth biggest). He has also reversed the B.O.M.C. technique. By letting customers pick the books through their own jury panel, Editor Shimkin expects to keep in better touch with what they want, hopes to catch up with the leaders.

Because of their vast success, book clubs have raised fears that books may soon be tailored less to art than to the requirements of the clubs' mass audience. That tendency is already obvious in the tremendous sales of trashy or second-rate books. But bookmen also argue that if clubs keep springing up there will soon be a club for every taste. And no one denies that clubs, by selling books to those who never bought before, have expanded the market enormously. Before the clubs began, there were only 1,000,000 people in the U.S. who bought books regularly. Now, in the clubs alone, there are 3,000,000.