Left Books

With "the almost incredible circulation of books in the Soviet Union . . . before us as a glorious example," smart Publisher Victor Gollancz set out in London last week to assuage the appetites of literate Leftists regularly and at small cost. Launched with Mr. Gollancz' customary well-bred ballyhoo was the Left Book Club. To join, readers had only to pledge that they would buy once a month a cheap special edition of a radical or near-radical book which Victor Gollancz, Ltd. would send them. As usual, Victor Gollancz' competitors bit their quills, wished to blazes they had thought up the idea first.

To start things off with a bang, Publisher Gollancz gave charter members two books for the price of one as the Left Book Club's May issue. For their 2s.6d. (60-c-), the 5,000 initial subscribers received a timely study called France Today and the People's Front, by burly, bull-necked Maurice Thorez, secretary of the French Communist Party, and Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future, by Texas University's famed Professor Hermann Joseph Muller. Five-feet-two with eyes of blue, wee Professor Muller has been experimenting in genetics at the Soviet Academy of Science in Leningrad. Some monstrous fruit flies which he grew under x-rays made the first news Texas had from him in three years. Professor Muller's book will probably find small favor in Austin. It discusses the possibility of breeding humans in the laboratory.

The discovery that Leftists are as hungry for reading matter about their favorite subject as jazz addicts or baseball fans is only the latest of many sound ideas which have germinated beneath the bald skull of Victor Gollancz. A highly successful combination of commercialism and intellectualism, he was born 43 years ago into a distinguished family of London Jews, went to Oxford, was appointed an Army schoolmaster during the War when faulty eyesight barred him from active service. After the War, he learned the publishing business thoroughly with the Ernest Benn tradepapers, branched out on his own in 1927. First Gollancz book was John Van Druten's poignant public-school play, Young Woodley. First Gollancz success was another play of public-school heroics,

R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, which in 1928 sold 100,000 copies, put the fledgling firm on its financial feet. Once established, Publisher Gollancz astounded his competitors with the vigor of his advertising, revolutionized England's literary publicity with boldfaced, importunate copy. No slouch on the mechanical side of the business, Publisher Gollancz took a lesson from German Tauchnitz, standardized the binding and typography of his product. Since the world fell on troubled times, he has had the wit to add to his large general list a lively line of pink political writings which have made his firm the semi-official organ of Britain's intellectual Left. Although Publisher Gollancz says he expects to do no better than make ends meet with the Left Book Club, its membership is thoroughly circularized with impelling Gollancz advertising calculated to whet the notoriously voracious literary radical hunger for more costly Red texts on the Gollancz list.

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