英语词汇book club的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

book club. America’s first book club was the Book-of-the- Month Club, founded in April 1926 by Harry Scherman with Robert Haas as president. Its distinguished panel of judges con- sisted of Dorothy Canfield, Heywood Broun, Henry Seidel Canby, William Allen White, and Christopher Morley, and they chose as the first book-of-the-month Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman (Viking) to be distributed to 4,750 members. Within 20 years the club had revolutionized the publishing industry and 25 similar clubs were distributing 75 million books, over one-sixth of all Amer- ican book sales. Customarily, members receive a free book or books upon joining a book club and a free book with every two or three books purchased. Book club editions are often, but not always, printed on cheaper paper. While the clubs have been criticized for inculcating a mediocrity of taste, they have of- fered many excellent books to their members and there is no doubt that they bring books to areas without bookstores. An- cestors of the book clubs were the circulating libraries of the 19th century, which supplied popular novels to readers for a small subscription price. These libraries often forced publishers to conform to their puritanical standards and made good writ- ing all the more difficult. George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) treats the subject in detail.

词汇	book club
词源	book club. America’s first book club was the Book-of-the- Month Club, founded in April 1926 by Harry Scherman with Robert Haas as president. Its distinguished panel of judges con- sisted of Dorothy Canfield, Heywood Broun, Henry Seidel Canby, William Allen White, and Christopher Morley, and they chose as the first book-of-the-month Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman (Viking) to be distributed to 4,750 members. Within 20 years the club had revolutionized the publishing industry and 25 similar clubs were distributing 75 million books, over one-sixth of all Amer- ican book sales. Customarily, members receive a free book or books upon joining a book club and a free book with every two or three books purchased. Book club editions are often, but not always, printed on cheaper paper. While the clubs have been criticized for inculcating a mediocrity of taste, they have of- fered many excellent books to their members and there is no doubt that they bring books to areas without bookstores. An- cestors of the book clubs were the circulating libraries of the 19th century, which supplied popular novels to readers for a small subscription price. These libraries often forced publishers to conform to their puritanical standards and made good writ- ing all the more difficult. George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) treats the subject in detail.
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