BOOK CLUB COMMUNITY PAGE
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This page is for you! Please send me info on your book club: history, books discussed, meeting day & time, photos, etc. I will be very glad to post everything here, and thus we'll create a community of book clubs and book lovers!
Book discussions are, no doubt, as old as books themselves, but certainly became more common with the invention of the printing press around 1455.
The literary salons of Paris helped shape the cultural scene there in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Encyclopedia Americana defined these salons as "fashionable assemblage(s), generally of literary, artistic, and political figures, held regularly in a private home." The hostesses were often authors in their own right, like Mlle. de Scudéry (1607-1701), Mme. Françoise Scarron (1635-1719), and Mme. de Staël (1766-1817).
Coffee houses were a humbler, but no less vital, forum. In 1652, Pasqua Rosee opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, London. A native of Smyrna, a port in Western Turkey, where the young man had learned to prepare the beverage, Rosee had been brought to London by a merchant named Daniel Edwards, whose friends so liked the unique brew that he allowed his servant to open the city's first coffee-house. The venture was an immediate success, so much so that large numbers of coffee-houses were established throughout the city in imitation of the first. From its unpretentious beginnings in Cornhill, the coffee-house quickly became the centre of London social life as well as one of the city's most remarkable social institutions.
The coffee-house itself was not unique to London. As Francis Bacon noted in his Sylva Sylvarum in 1627, "They have in Turkey a drink called Coffee, and they take it, and sit at it in their Coffee Houses, which are like our Taverns." Yet in London the coffee-house was unique in the extent to which it entrenched itself as an institution in the social, cultural, commercial, and political life of the city. "Foreigners remarked that the coffee-house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities," wrote Thomas Macauley in his History of England, "that the coffee-house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow."
The London coffee-houses provided a gathering place where, for a penny admission charge, any man who was reasonably dressed could smoke his long, clay pipe, sip a dish of coffee, read the newsletters of the day, or enter into conversation with other patrons. At the period when journalism was in its infancy and the postal system was unorganised and irregular, the coffee-house provided a centre of communication for news and information. Runners were sent round to the coffee-house to report major events of the day, such as victory in battle or political upheaval, and the newsletters and gazettes of the day were distributed chiefly in the coffee-house. Most of the establishments functioned as reading rooms, for the cost of newspapers and pamphlets was included in the admission charge. In addition, bulletins announcing sales, sailings, and auctions covered the walls of the establishments, providing valuable information to the businessman who conducted much of his business from a table at his favourite coffee-house.
Naturally, this dissemination of news led to the dissemination of ideas, and the coffee-house served as a forum for their discussion. As the eminent social historian G. M. Trevelyan observed: "The 'Universal liberty of speech of the English nation'...was the quintessence of Coffee House life." "Wherever men gathered to discuss the ideas circulated in print," wrote Anthony J. LaVopa ("The Birth of Public Opinion," in Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1991), "a network of 'enlightened' communities peopled by only a few thousand souls, invented public opinion as a way of talking about and validating itself."
Jacques Barzun ("Three Men and a Book," in American Scholar, Summer 2001) wrote that "in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, small groups of people clubbed together to buy books because they were expensive." In 1754, frugal readers founded the New York Society Library and, soon afterward, there arose the Boston Library Society (both institutions still thrive today).
According to Brad Hooper ("The Mother of All Book Clubs," Booklist, Sept. 15, 2001) perhaps the earliest community book discussion club in the US, like those meeting in today's living rooms was founded in 1877, by the ladies in the small Corn-Belt town of Mattoon, Illinois (the club still meets). Beaufort, SC was not far behind: Mary Elizabeth Waterhouse founded the Clover Club literary society in 1891.
Kate Clifford Larson told of Boston's Saturday Evening Girl's Club (1899) in "The Saturday Evening Girls Progressive Era Library Club and the Intellectual Life of Working Class and Immigrant Girls of the Working Class and Immigrant Girls in Turn-of-the-Century Boston" (Library Quarterly, April 2001): "While most clubs for girls generally centered on sewing, cooking, and other domestic duties, some clubs began to emerge that addressed the intellectual needs of girls and young women," in this case "poor, young Jewish and Italian working women and girls living in the North End of Boston."
Indeed, F. Michael Perko ("Alternative Forms of Education," in the Encyclopedia of Social History) saw literary clubs as an important form of self-education. From 1880 to 1900, three times as many books were being published in the United States than before the Civil War, and in the 1870s and 1880s a growing number of books were being sold by subscription. The Literary Guild (1921), the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926), and the mass-marketing of publisher Nelson Doubleday (1889-1949) made finding a good book even easier, and whetted the public's appetite for discussion groups.
The Great Books Foundation was established in 1947, with more than 43,000 participants in 300 cities within its first year. Its heyday was the 1950s and 1960, after which book study clubs in schools, churches and communities took the lead. Around 1993, Perko noted that membership in the clubs "remains primarily female." Some clubs focus on specific genres, like mysteries and romance novels.
The Internet of course, has now taken these discussions out into Cyberspace and into a truly global community. However, no discussion of book clubs is complete without talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, whose "Oprah Book Club" (begun in 1996) made readers of millions of daytime television viewers. Quoted by Mary Ann Grossmann in "Why Did Oprah End Book Club" (St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press , April 11, 2002), Oprah gave her reason for ending her first "version" of the Club in 2002: "It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share." Oprah soon had a change of heart, however, and started a new Book Club. "The book club is back and I am on a mission," said Oprah on the Web site. "My mission is to make this the biggest book club in the world and get people reading again. Not just reading, but reading great books!"
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