Abstract
The recognizable orange, white and black colour scheme catches the attention of patrons passing by the local library bulletin board for reading groups.1 The brochure’s headline, ‘PENGUIN READERS’ BOOK OF THE MONTH’, jumps out from the various pamphlets on display. The front text tells us that Penguin asked ‘hundreds of librarians nationwide’ (in the UK) to recommend contemporary novels that they believed would appeal to reading groups. Inside the brochure we find six Penguin titles for their 2005 ‘Book of the Month’ programme, ranging from Esther Freud’s The Sea House to The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. The programme, according to Penguin, includes novels that ‘appeal to each member of the wide-ranging library reading groups that they will be running and supporting for the next six months’.2
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Notes
4. Jon Bekken, ‘Books and Commerce in an Age of Virtual Capital: the Changing Political Economy of Bookselling’, in Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age, ed. Roma Harris and Manjunath Pendakur (Aurora, Ontario: Garamond Press, 2002); Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: the Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
5. Danielle Fuller, Writing the Everyday, 46–58; Elizabeth Long, ‘The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing’, Book Research Quarterly 1, 4 (1985–1986): 3–27.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Polity Press, 1993); Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, Inside Book Publishing, 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2008); David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage Publications, 2002).
7. Li Robbins, ‘Book Club Virgin (and Proud of It): the Scorn of the Solitary Reader’, CBC, at www.cbc.ca/arts/books/bookclubvirgin.html (accessed 6 December 2009).
8. Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ix.
9. Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ix.
10. Darren K. Carlson, ‘Poll Shows Continuing Strong American Reading Habits’, in Nonfiction More Popular than Fiction: Book Discussion Groups not a Large Factor Yet (Princeton, NJ: Gallup News Service, 1999).
11. For discussion on imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1991). See also Rehberg Sedo’s Introduction, Snape (Chapter 3) and Howie (Chapter 4) above.
13. Squires, ‘Novelistic Production and the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland’, in Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000, ed. Brian Shaffer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 181.
14. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992); Queenie D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
15. Geoffrey Faber, A Publisher Speaking (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 29.
16. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001); Fred Kobrak and Beth Luey, The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Schiffrin, The Business of Books; Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business & Book Publishing (Irvington, NY: Wesleyan University Press; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1981).
18. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). See also the seminal work of Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, The William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) for a discussion of the historical foundations of a cultural hierarchy in the US as a market reaction, especially pages 230–1; John Seabrook, Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (New York: Vintage, 2001).
21. Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
22. Stephen Cooke, ‘Approachable Arden Shares Love of Books’, Sunday Herald, 9 December 2001.
24. Rehberg Sedo, ‘Readers in Reading Groups: an On-Line Survey of Face-to-Face and Virtual Book Clubs’, Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9, 1 (2003): 66–90; ‘Badges of Wisdom’, 200–3.
25. Elizabeth Long, ‘The Book as Mass Commodity: the Audience Perspective’, Book Research Quarterly 3, 1 (1987): 19.
26. Elizabeth Long, ‘The Book as Mass Commodity: the Audience Perspective’, Book Research Quarterly 3, 1 (1987): 19.
27. Hartley, Reading Groups; Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Rehberg Sedo, ‘Badges of Wisdom’.
31. This finding is different from that of a 2009 ReadingGroupGuide.com survey, which claims that only 15 per cent of groups read paperback only. The for-profit website’s survey is accessible through www.readinggroupguides.com/surveys/survey_results.asp.
32. Martha Burns and Alice Dillon, Reading Group Journal: Notes in the Margin (New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 1999); Harry Heft and Peter O’Brien, Building a Better Book Club (Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1999); David Laskin and Holly Hughs, The Reading Group Book: the Complete Guide to Starting and Sustaining a Reading Group, with Annotated Lists of 250 Titles for Provocative Discussion (New York: Plume, 1995); Victoria Golden McMains, The Readers’ Choice: 200 Book Club Favorites (New York: Quill, 2000); Kira Stevens and Ellen Moore, Good Books Lately: the One-Stop Resource for Book Groups and Other Greedy Readers (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2004); Mickey Pearlman, What to Read: the Essential Guide for Reading Group Members and other Book Lovers, 2nd edn (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
34. Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11.
35. Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11.
37. Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Paul DiMaggio, ‘Classification in Art’, American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440–55.
41. ‘The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections’, Council on Library and Information Resources, http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/appendix1.html (accessed 21 December 2010).
42. M.J. Rose, ‘Everything Old is New Again: Reinventing the Publishing Model’, Poets & Writers: From Inspiration to Publication, http://www.pw.org/mag/rose0205.htm (accessed 22 July 2005).
43. Robert McCrum, ‘E-Read All About It’, Guardian, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5374656-110368,00.html (accessed 15 January 2006).
44. ‘Profile of Book Publishing and Exclusive Agency, for English Language Firms’, Canadian Statistics, http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/arts02.htm (accessed 21 December 2010).
45. ‘Profile of Book Publishing and Exclusive Agency, for French Language Firms’, Statistics Canada, http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/arts05.htm (accessed 22 December 2010).
47. Linda Leith, ‘Ladies of the Club: Spontaneous by Nature, Reading Groups Betray Few Common Traits, except that they’re Social, Self-Educating and Very Likely Sisterly’, Quill & Quire (May 1995): 8–9.
49. Val Ross, ‘Gathered Together in Literature’s Name’, Globe & Mail, 14 January 1995.
54. This information was found at the following webpage, but is no longer available: www.tbrnetwork.com/advertising/advertising_aug2004.pdf (accessed 24 August 2005).
56. ‘Reading Group Center’, http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/book-sellers.html (accessed 26 August 2005).
62. This information was retrieved from a survey in which Rehberg Sedo participated at the following webpage, but it is no longer available: www.harpercollins.com/survey.net (accessed 26 August 2005).
64. ‘Group of the Month’, Penguin, at http://readers.penguin.co.uk/nf/shared/WebDisplay/0,,70753_1_2,00.html (accessed 12 September 2009).
65. Raymond N. MacKenzie, ‘Penguin Books’, in British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965, ed. Jonathan Rose and Patricia Anderson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991).
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© 2011 Danielle Fuller, DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Claire Squires
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Fuller, D., Sedo, D.R., Squires, C. (2011). Marionettes and Puppeteers? The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers. In: Sedo, D.R. (eds) Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_10
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