Left Book Club

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The Left Book Club, founded in 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and 1940s in the United Kingdom. The club, run by Victor Gollancz, supplied a book chosen every month by Gollancz and his panel – himself, Harold Laski and John Strachey – to its members, who by the outbreak of the second world war numbered 57,000, many of whom participated in one or other of the 1,500 or so Left Discussion Groups scattered around the country.

The books and pamphlets with their distinctive yellow (hardback) or orange (paperback) covers sold for 2s 6d to members and more to the general public. The volumes included history, science, reporting and fiction and covered a range of subjects, but all with a left-leaning slant. Among the authors of its 200-plus volumes were Arthur Koestler, André Malraux, George Orwell, Katharine Burdekin and Clement Attlee.

Until the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 (and indeed for some time afterwards), the club’s output included many authors who were members of the Communist Party or close to it, and it avoided any criticism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, refusing Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Indeed, it published some extraordinary encomiums to the wonders of Stalinism, among them Dudley Collard’s Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others (a defence of the show trials), Pat Sloan’s Soviet Democracy (a propagandist tract extolling Stalin’s 1936 constitution), a reprint of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: a new civilisation, J. R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and its Critics (notable for its virulent assault on Trotsky) and Hewlett Johnson’s The Socialist Sixth of the World.

By early 1940, however, Gollancz had broken with the CP – a process documented in the articles collected in Betrayal of the Left in early 1941 – and from then on the club took a strongly democratic socialist line until its demise in 1948.

Gollancz was a notoriously interventionist editor. He published Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier but insisted on prefacing its account of working-class life in the north of England with an introduction disowning its criticisms of middle-class socialists who had little understanding of working class life – and later republished the book leaving out the second part of which he disapproved.

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Correction to second paragraph:

Left Book Club editions were in fact red (not yellow) hardbacks or orange soft (not paper) backs. The Gollancz distinctive yellow hardbacks were their general fiction covers. Some Left Book Club special editions appeared in yellow paperback form.

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