British Publishers’ Guild – An Early Competitor to Penguin in the paperback revolution

Sometimes it isn’t the value of a book that makes is desirable to a collection but it’s associations and the story a volume can reveal. My own collection is full of books with a personal connections, provenance and history – these far outweigh those which might have any real monetary value. And during today’s cataloguing endeavours a little gem, revealing much about publishing history as well conditions during the late 1930s and early 1940s, passed across my desk.

Rebecca West’s The Harsh Voice is collection of four novellas first published in 1935. Reviewing the volume in the New York Times, Edith Wharton described then as ‘miniature novels…chiefly remarkable for their technical brilliance. They have a smooth high glase, a competence of construction, reminiscent of Somerset Maugham at his slickest and most suave”. In setting, the novellas straddle the 1929 Wall Street Crash and each is in some way is concerned with money and its potential to corrupt.

The volume in hand, though, is different. To start with, in contains only three novellas – Life Sentence, The Salt of the Earth and The Abiding Vision. ‘There is No Conversation’, which appeared in the original edition is absent – perhaps as a cost saving measure. It was published by Jonathan Cape for the British Publishers Guild. The British Publishers Guild was a loose collaboration between a handful of British publishers (Jonathan Cape, Cassell, Chatto and Windus, Dent, Faber & Faber, George Harrap, William Heinemann and Johnathan Murray were the founding members) who came together in 1940 to produce paperbacks to challenge Penguin’s dominance of the low-priced book market. Paper Revolution described the Guild as the ‘Anyone But Penguin Society’.

Guild books were published in uniform formats by the individual publishers but with the imprint ‘Published for The British Publishers Guild’. As all titles were to be copyright works, none of the usual classics of the English cannon featured. The first 36 volumes were published in February and March 1941 – there were 12 red Guild Sixes (costing sixpence), 12 blue Guild Nines (costing ninepence) and 12 green Guild Twelves (costing a shilling). The endeavour was not particularly successful and further titles were slow to come. Co-ordinating across so many publishers was likely difficult, and the enterprise was hampered war time meaures including paper rationing, but there is also a sense of a lack of commitment and energy from a group of publishers who had anyway been slow to develop their own paperback imprints. The Guild was nothing if not a Johnny come lately to the paperback party.