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On a recent book buying trip in Canterbury, we acquired a lovely, large collection of Mystery Book Guild volumes. The Mystery Book Guild, which was headed by Howard Haycraft and owned by the same people as the Literary Guild, picked the finest contemporary crime and thriller novels and reissued them, in a uniform style, to its members at the rate of two a month. Often featuring leading crime and thriller authors of the time, its editors also and the knack of picking new and emerging talents, for instance publishing some of Jack Higgins’ early works published under his real name, Harry Patterson.
Mystery Book Guild titles not only represented some of the finest genre fiction of the era but were also issued in a distinctive, uniform style with an attractive diamond-designed dust jacket; and almost all appear to be around 184 pages long, which is a feat of design and editorship, given the varying lengths of the original works. These volumes build into pleasing sets on the shelf, meaning that they are as attractive to the eye as they are to the reader. This perhaps goes some way to explain why Mystery Book Guild works are becoming quite collectible and desirable. Certainly they tend not to stay long our shelves, even when we can find them! They do not, though, have the collectors’ cache of being first editions or association copies in any way, so they still represent solid value for the money for the reader.
Have a look at the Mystery Book Guild titles we have in stock at the moment.
And, of course, please do add a comment or two below if you have more information about the Mystery Book Guild. We’d love to hear what you think of this series of books too.
