Left Book Club

The Left Book Club, founded in May 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and 1940s in the United Kingdom set up by Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz and John Strachey to revitalise and educate the British Left. The Club's aim was to "help in the struggle For world peace and against fascism". Aiming to break even with 2,500 members, it had 40,000 within the first year and by 1939 it was up to 57,000. The LBC was one of the first book clubs in the UK and, as such, played an important role in the evolution of the country's book trade.

The club supplied a book chosen every month by Gollancz and his panel — Harold Laski and John Strachey — to its members, many of whom participated in one or other of the 1,500 or so Left Discussion Groups scattered around the country. Contributors included G. D. H. Cole, André Malraux, Katharine Burdekin and Clement Attlee, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, John Strachey, Clifford Odets, Edgar Snow, Ellen Wilkinson, R. H. Tawney, Léon Blum, J. B. S. Haldane and Stephen Spender.

The books and pamphlets with their distinctive orange (paperback 1936–38) or red (hardback 38–48) covers with their legend — not for sale to the public — sold for 2s 6d to members. Many titles were available for sale only in the LBC edition, with monthly 'choices' received by all members, with additional optional titles reprinting current socialist and 'progressive' classics. The volumes included history, science, reporting and fiction and covered a range of subjects, but all with a left-leaning slant.

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 of Great Britain or close to it, and it avoided any criticism of Joseph 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. The book World Revolution: 1917-1936 by C. L. R. James was written as a Trotskyist critique of the LBC's coverage of the Soviet Union. However, even during this period, as a member of the Labour Party, Gollancz was concerned to keep the club at a formal distance from campaigns of which the Labour Party disapproved.

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. Despite its large membership and popular success the Book Club was always a huge financial drain on the publisher, with the advent of paper rationing at the onset of the war the club was restricted to just one monthly title. To replace the book club's additional choices and augment the LBC selections, Gollancz launched the "Victory Books" series, a series of shorter monographs available to the general public, including two of the biggest sellers of the War: Guilty Men by Cato (Michael Foot) and Your M.P. by Gracchus (Tom Wintringham).

In addition to books, the LBC also produced a monthly newsletter — with began as a simple club news sheet Left Book News, but gradually developed into a key international political and social affairs paper (as Left News) - with lengthy editorials from Gollancz. The LBC held its first annual LBC rally in February 1937, which were held until the late 40s.

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.

It can be argued that alongside the Fabian Society and Transport House, the LBC's popularising of socialist ideas was very influential on the Labour victory in the General Election of 1946. Many members acted as missionaries for the ideas espoused by the club, such as full employment, socialised medicine, town planning and social equality. Eight LBC authors were part of the new government (Lord Addison, Attlee, Bevan, Cripps, Philip Noel-Baker, Shinwell, Strachey and Wilkinson) and six were MPs (Maurice Edelman, Michael Foot, Elywyn Jones, JPW Mallalieu, Stephen Swingler and Konni Zilliacus). This lead Victor Gollancz's biographer to write, "for an individual without official position, Victor's colossal influence on a vital election remains unmatched in twentieth-century political history." However, Gollancz was not rewarded with a position in the House of Lords by Clement Atlee who was worried he would become a thorn in his side there.

In 2006, Ed Miliband MP started the Left Book Club Online as a successor to the original Left Book Club with the aim of stimulating debate around left-wing ideas and texts, but not publishing new work. The website now appears to be defunct.

A small group of booksellers in the UK are working on bringing back a publishing version of the Left Book Club and established a Limited company of the same name in 2002, their site LeftBookClub.com was launched in 2007, which also appears to be defunct.