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- Title
'The age of shouting had arrived': Victor Gollancz, Stanley Morison, and the reimagining of marketing at Victor Gollancz, Ltd and the Left Book Club.
- Authors
Roscoe, Jonathan
- Abstract
When George Orwell's advertising copywriting anti-hero, Gordon Comstock, declared in the 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying , 'advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket' (Victor Gollancz, London, p. 55), he was expressing something deep in the British psyche, that of the dichotomy between the creation of art and the pursuit of revenue. Nowhere is this seen more keenly than in publishing during the period. It is also significant that the third of Orwell's novels was, like the previous ones, published by Victor Gollancz, because, despite the widespread view that in publishing it was a time of inertia, of maintaining the status quo, it is, of course, not as simple as that. Despite a lack of innovation in the industry the 1930s, reading numbers increased, more books were sold than ever before, the industry commercialized to an extent unseen in previous decades, and three of publishing's most innovative men came to prominence. This paper seeks to explain how this came about—how an inherently conservative industry, with its prices and profit margins stabilized and protected by the Net Book Agreement, became radicalized in a way not seen before. I will contest that it is that very conservatism that made innovation both necessary and inevitable; that the growth in readership and disposable income during the period made it necessary to commercialize the publishing industry if it was to grow and prosper; and that business in general was waking up to the possibilities offered by marketing, and so publishing needed to harness the power of marketing if it was not to fall behind the business curve. Marketing can sometimes be about art or politics, but it is always about business. Where does that leave a personally wealthy, philanthropically inclined, but commercially minded publisher such as Gollancz? His enthusiastic take-up of the new marketing tools and processes that had come to prominence in the 1920s started with his time at Ernest Benn, accelerated with the founding of his new publishing company in 1928, and went into overdrive in 1936 when the Left Book Club was founded. It is true to say that Gollancz's success was founded on three pillars: an unshakeable faith in his own abilities, an uncanny knack of selecting the 'right' titles commercially, and a thorough embracing of all that marketing and publicity had to offer, with little thought as to how that might appear to others as long as it was working for him. He was fortunate to have supporting him another great iconoclast of the time—the typographer Stanley Morison. This paper is as much about the Gollancz–Morison double act as it is about Gollancz individually, even if there can be no doubt as to the true driving force behind the changes.
- Subjects
VICTOR Gollancz Ltd.; COPYWRITING; CREATION; LITERATURE publishing; WRITTEN communication
- Publication
LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, 2018, Vol 29, Issue 2/3, p9
- ISSN
0957-9656
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1163/18784712-02902003