Content area
Full text
In a report for the Society of Bookmen in 1928, British publishers estimated that between a quarter and two-thirds of all the books they published went to the big four circulating libraries: Boots, W. H. Smith, Mudie's, and the Times Book Club. This article examines the literary impact of one of the largest of these, Boots Book-lovers' Library (1899-1966), which by 1935 had around four hundred libraries attached to its high-street pharmacies catering for the literary tastes of over one million subscribers a year. The article considers the impact of the Boots Book-lovers' Library on authors' practices of writing and revision and on literary marketing and censorship, focusing in particular on James Hanley's The Furys (1935) and using unpublished correspondence in the Chatto & Windus archive at the University of Reading to demonstrate how the publisher's sense of the tastes and expectations of the Boots library reader influenced the revisioning process.
It is increasingly apparent that, for better or for worse, we have be- come a nation of book-borrowers.
-F. R. Richardson, "The Circulating Library," 1935
In 1935 F. R. Richardson, head of Boots Book-lovers' Library, con- tributed an essay titled "The Circulating Library" to a volume featuring the great and the good of the contemporary book world.1 In the book's introduction, Stanley Unwin, president of the Publishers' Association, lamented the fact that the "New Reading Public" were not on the whole buying books despite the proliferation of cheap series in the market and the wide availability of books at three shillings and sixpence (3s. 6d.) "and still more often 2s." "Books are the last thing most people have any intention of buying, or can ever be persuaded to buy," wrote Unwin.2 This was in many ways a familiar cry from the publishing and booksell- ing industry, but the effects of increased library borrowing and the role of private circulating libraries in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century have often been overlooked in literary and cultural analyses and histories of reading. This essay seeks to redress this through an exami- nation from publishers' archives of how the Boots Book-lovers' Library market impacted editorial policy, literary marketing and censorship, and authors' practices of writing and revision. It focuses in particular on the...