Science Fiction Book Club
Entry updated 14 April 2025. Tagged: Publisher.
We use the term book club in its older sense, that of a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops. More recently the term has been applied to a discussion club, usually informal, where a group of people gather regularly to discuss a previously decided book. This sense of the term is rarely used in this encyclopedia, except when we list a title like Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (2004). Book clubs in the traditional sense can frequently be encountered in author Checklists, where commercial organizations – like the Science Fiction Book Club, or Nelson Doubleday, or GuildAmerica – are often listed as a book's publisher; though the most famous of them all, the Book of the Month Club, appears very rarely.
Science fiction book clubs were started in both the UK and the USA at roughly the same time in 1952/1953. In SF Magazines the UK club was first advertised in New Worlds for January 1953 and the US club in Galaxy for April 1953, though Wilson Tucker's Science Fiction News Letter #28 (Winter 1952/1953) reports a US SFBC ad in a Chicago newspaper from November 1952. The UK version was owned in its early years by Sidgwick and Jackson, then by Dent as part of that company's Readers' Union group of book clubs, and finally by David and Charles, who bought the Readers' Union group in the 1970s. David and Charles's management, which contained no sf enthusiasts, was apathetic towards the SFBC, which later became subject to competition from Encounters, a book club aggressively promoted by the larger group Book Club Associates. UK SFBC offerings were almost exclusively reprints: in its better years from Faber and Faber, Gollancz and other UK publishers of note; in leaner times resorting to routine fare from Robert Hale Limited. Even before the death in 1982 of its freelance consultant Edmund Cooper, the editorless UK SFBC was slowly petering out, despite part- and spare-time efforts by one Readers' Union employee, Paul G Begg, to keep it alive; it died altogether some time after Begg left the company.
The US SFBC, by contrast, long had a history of continuity. It was originally published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc, an associate of, but distinct from, Doubleday, whose differing imprint is Doubleday and Company, Inc. In 1986 the US SFBC was sold, along with Doubleday, to the German company Bertelsmann, and from 1989 to 1998 its publications appeared under the GuildAmerica imprint, reverting thereafter to The Science Fiction Book Club. Control passed to the Bertelsmann/Time Warner imprint Bookspan, solely owned by Bertelsmann 2007-2008 and then sold to a Najafi Companies subsidiary known as Direct Brands, which in turn was sold in 2013 to the media company Pride Tree Holdings. In December 2024 the US SFBC website abruptly announced that book orders would no longer be processed after 2 January 2025.
The US club was far larger than the UK club ever was, offered a very much broader selection, published its own editions (including special hardcover editions of paperback originals) and created books – omnibuses of various sorts – especially for its members. It is thus duly listed as the publisher of record for many such omnibus editions in author Checklists. (The UK club normally presented no more than one reprint title per month, initially of reasonable production quality but latterly reprinted cheaply on inferior paper and with a cheap binding and cover.) The US SFBC was in its day a major force in sf publishing. Under the aegis of Nelson Doubleday it published many first editions of individual titles; GuildAmerica and its corporate successors were less active as an original publisher. [MJE/JGr/JC/DRL]
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