America's book club tries to recapture glory days

The Book-of-the-Month club was a trendsetter and tastemaker for generations.

In the glory days, literary giants such as Mordechai Richler and Wilfred Sheed would meet for lunch and brandy every month in New York to select which new novels should be offered to America's readers.

In this thoroughly bookish way, the Book-of-the-Month-Club became the trendsetter and tastemaker for generations. Along the way a host of new, exciting writers such as JD Salinger were discovered and then exposed to a wider audience. The Book-of-the-Month club made them famous. But now, faced with plunging membership and under attack from brash rivals such as Oprah Winfrey's book club, mass-market retailers and online booksellers such as Amazon (see link below), the club which spawned a host of imitators is undergoing a traumatic overhaul.

One of the first moves has been to scrap the panel of literary figures, including novelists Annie Proulx and Anna Quindlan and the writer Bill Bryson, who make the club's prestigious monthly selection. "A lot of the things that I had the opportunity to look at, I think might have been overlooked otherwise," Ms Quindlan told the New York Times. "I'd hate to see them veer too much towards the predictable best-sellers. That's sort of cheap and easy."

At the Book-of-the-Month Club, which is now part of Time Warner, suggestions that it is "dumbing down" are adamantly denied. Spokesman Kevin Goldman said the editors who would be making selections for readers from now on were the best in publishing and that its selection of books was second to none. "We're very proud of our editors. Our pre-selection is unparalleled within the publishing community," he said. The selection panel, which traditionally held its boozy lunches in midtown Manhattan, was initially dropped in 1994 in an effort to try and ensure the club's books appealed to a wider audience.

Then it was reinstated in 2001 in an effort to try and return such of the literary prestige associated with the panel. Mr Goldman said: "We did that for four years and it was a good programme but we are now going in a different direction....We have to reinvent it to keep going." It is clear the club, founded in 1926 by former advertising executive Harry Scherman, faces many challenges.

Current membership of the club stands at around 400,000 compared to 1.5m in 1988. "In an era when not every community had a bookstore, the book clubs played the great social role of selecting books that would be of interest to the wider public," said Michael Carlisle, partner at New York literary agency Inkwell Management. The most recent members of the selection panel, who were each paid $50,000 a year for their work, have made a number of selections that turned into massive hits.

Among these recent selections were The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst and a non-fiction work, Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

The club said that in future members will receive 17 mailings a year which will include a monthly selection that they can accept or reject. From now on, however, those selections will be chosen by the club's staff on the basis of a member's previous purchases and his or her expressed interests. The system will operate much like the selections offered by Amazon.Com.

Among the current "editors selections" suggested on the club's website are The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett and Collapse, Jared Diamond's newly released examination of why some societies succeed and other fail. The club also hopes that membership will be boosted by a new feature that allows readers to further tailor their choices by selecting which of five subject categories - mystery and suspense, history and biography, fiction, home and health or current affairs - they would like their books chosen from.

"We've been playing around with different formulas for quite a while now," said Seth Radwell, the president of club's editorial group. "We've always prided ourselves in picking good books across different genres. Now we're starting with a new mode that gives the consumer much more choice."

- INDEPENDENT