The Reprint Society

The Reprint Society, trading as World Books, was a book club in the United Kingdom founded by Alan Bott in 1939 who also started the Book Society, the Avalon Press and Pan Books. The club dominated the middle brow sector of the book club business in the U.K. until it was sold in 1966.

Editorial Board

The initial editorial board included:[1]

First books

The first six books offered were:[1]

Possibly the first advert for the club, in The Times, offered Seven Pillars of Wisdom in two volumes for three shillings and six pence (3/6s) per volume, bound in buckram and with a gilt stamped leather title label on the spine. Supplies were described as limited by war-time conditions.[1] A cheaper, cloth-bound, version was available at only 2/6s.

Heyday

The heyday of the club was probably in the 1950s when membership had grown to 200,000 from an initial 2,000 and reducing costs enabled the reintroduction of the signature buckram bindings for which the club was known. The club boasted in its advertising that it was the largest in the British Commonwealth.[2]

Sale

In 1966, firm was acquired by W.H. Smith and Doubleday and renamed Book Club Associates which traded using a number of different club names.[3] The Reprint Society was described at the time by its Managing Director, Tony Barrett, as being a company serving the "broad brow" reader rather than the "high brow" reached by The Readers Union or the middle or lower brow reached by other clubs.[4]

gollark: No, it does.
gollark: - PotatOS uses a single global process manager instance for nested potatOS instances. The ID is incremented by 1 each time a new process starts.- But each nested instance runs its own set of processes, because I never made them not do that and because without *some* of them things would break.- PotatOS has a "fast reboot" feature where, if you reboot in the sandbox, instead of *actually* rebooting the computer it just reinitializes the sandbox a bit.- For various reasons (resource exhaustion I think, mostly), if you nest it, stuff crashes a lot. This might end up causing some of the nested instances to reboot.- When they reboot, some of their processes many stay online because I never added sufficient protections against that because it never really came up.- The slowness is because each event goes to about 200 processes which then maybe do things.
gollark: WRONG!
gollark: It doesn't reuse already allocated IDs.
gollark: Don't read too much into that.

References
  1. Advertising in The Times, 12 December 1939, p. 4.
  2. Advertising in The Times, No. 52741, 1 October 1953, p. 8.
  3. The Competition Commission: Book Club Associates and Leisure Circle A report on the merger situation 1988. Archived 2010-12-06 at the Wayback Machine Chpt. 2, p. 8.
  4. "Book clubs faced with a chapter of uncertainties" by Tony Barrett in The Times, 25 November 1966, No. 56798, p. 13.
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