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The Reprint Society, trading as World Books, was a book club in the United Kingdom founded by Alan Bott in 1939 who also started the Book Society, the Avalon Press and Pan Books. The club dominated the middle brow sector of the book club business in the U.K. until it was sold in 1966.
The initial editorial board included: [1]
The first six books offered were: [1]
Possibly the first advert for the club, in The Times, offered Seven Pillars of Wisdom in two volumes for three shillings and six pence (3/6) per volume, bound in buckram and with a gilt stamped leather title label on the spine. Supplies were described as limited by war-time conditions. [1] A cheaper, cloth-bound, version was available at only 2/6s.
The heyday of the club was probably in the 1950s when membership had grown to 200,000 from an initial 2,000 and reducing costs enabled the reintroduction of the signature buckram bindings for which the club was known. The club boasted in its advertising that it was the largest in the British Commonwealth. [2]
In 1966, firm was acquired by W.H. Smith and Doubleday and renamed Book Club Associates which traded using a number of different club names. [3] The Reprint Society was described at the time by its Managing Director, Tony Barrett, as being a company serving the "broad brow" reader rather than the "high brow" reached by The Readers Union or the middle or lower brow reached by other clubs. [4]
Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
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Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of the experiences of British Army Colonel T. E. Lawrence while serving as a military advisor to Bedouin forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire of 1916 to 1918.
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