The Junior Literary Guild and the Child Reader as Citizen

The study of American children’s literature has recently turned toward institutional histories of editing, publishing, and distribution, represented by Leonard S. Marcus’s Minders of Make-Believe (2008) and Jacalyn Eddy’s Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939 (2006).¹ Notably, neither of these good accounts discusses the Junior Literary Guild (JLG), the most important children’s book club from its founding in 1929 until the mid-1950s, when it turned its attention to serving libraries. The purpose of the present essay is to introduce the JLG into institutional histories of children’s literature and to situate it within the social concerns of the afterglow of the Progressive Era. While the JLG was successful at developing and maintaining a constituency for its wares partly because it addressed structural weaknesses in distribution within children’s publishing, it also negotiated and often reconciled an array of contradictory ways of framing the child reader as potential citizen. At a time when parental and institutional control of children’s cultural consumption was in flux owing to new standards of child rearing and the appearance of new media that threatened reading’s centrality, the JLG suggested how institutional control might foster reading as preparation for citizenship in a democracy by addressing such questions as the following: Is the reader solitary or part of a community? Should children exercise choice in their reading or should it be exercised for them? Should children read at will and primarily for pleasure, or is reading best understood, in the language of the day, to be personally or socially hygienic in some fashion?

The JLG constructed a board of selectors and an advertising rhetoric that allowed it to insinuate itself between parents and children on the one hand and the newly professionalized supervisors of children’s reading—librarians—and their clientele on the other. We might expect the commercialization of expertise to arouse opposition from constituencies whose power it diminishes, but it does not seem to have done so in this case because the JLG interpolated a proxy for the parental or professional guide to children’s reading within its business model, effectively planting a child welfare expert in the heart of commercial publishing in a way that did not produce objection. It prepared the ground for this intercession through advertising that played upon late Progressive Era fears of both inadequate parental expertise and excessive parental emotional involvement in children’s development. Despite book clubs’ reputations for debasing taste and annihilating choice, the JLG developed bona fides as a promoter of young citizen readers because it urged participation in the community it constructed as an accessible means of inducing children to read good books. Because—unlike other book clubs—the JLG did not offer subscribers individual choice, it instead emphasized membership in the community it fabricated and in the subcommunities established by the child’s age and gender, since books were sent to subscribers based on the cohort to which they belonged. In stressing the importance of cooperating with the judges’ enterprise, it diminished the potential for rejection of its project as crassly commercial by suggesting that it trained children to become agents of their own destiny in ways other than by selecting their own reading. The club selections might not yet reflect the child reader’s taste, but participation in its community nonetheless prepared the child for citizenship because the judges were to be understood as experts in the most up-to-date child guidance theory, which would result in the most morally and intellectually healthy adult.²

Personnel

Once the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926, the idea of developing a similar organization for children suggested itself more or less immediately, with the Junior Monthly Book Service coming into being that year. It was joined by imitators such as the Junior Book Club, the Children’s Book Club, Selected Books for Juniors, and the Early Years Book Club, all founded no later than the beginning of 1929. Clearly, the existence of five book clubs aimed at children indicated a perception of a market...