No longer a "society"

Folio Society's Beowulf

Everything changes and nothing stands still.
--Heraclitus

All things do come to an end.  I suppose it only seems like it's usually the "good things" that we lose.

I received an email today informing me that my membership in the Folio Society would come to an end on September 1.  In fact, everyone's membership would end on that date.  The organization will simply publish books and market them to the general public after that date.

I had been a member since 1980.

What is/was the Folio Society?  In simplest terms, I suppose, it was a British book club.  But to me, and probably to most American members, it seemed more like a small, fraternal organization for the promotion and enjoyment of fine books -- "fine" in terms of both literary excellence and physical attributes.  Joining as I did, just out of law school, it seemed to provide a link between me and all those imagined virtues of educated Englishmen, virtues that attract an American Anglophile as flames attract moths.

The Folio Society was born in 1947.  It was thus 33 years old when I joined it for the 1981 calendar year.  I have thus been a member for more than half of the Society's life in post-war Britain. 

In August of each year, the Society sent out a prospectus listing planned publications for the following year.  At the time I joined, and for many years thereafter, one book was published each month.  You were required to order in advance at least four books each year to maintain your membership.  As a member, you also received a quarterly literary journal containing articles about forthcoming publications, and various publication bonuses for maintaining your membership.

What was unusual were both the titles published, and the format of the books.  Let me give you as an example a list of the titles I selected for my first year:

Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Guy de Maupassant, Une Vie
Greville's England
Thomas Bewick, My Life
The Pastons, a family in the Wars of the Roses
The Poems of Catullus

With the possible exception of the Waugh novel, I suggest these are not selections that you would have found offered by Book of the Month Club or the Literary Guild, here in America.

Similarly, the prospectus emphasized the printing and binding of each volume.  For many years, the Society pledged to use letterpress printing, rather than offset or more modern methods, wherever possible -- like a record club vowing to provide recordings on vinyl, rather than CD.  The bindings were beautiful, and, in years before my arrival, often odd to the point of amusing even the Society's stolid fans.  But the books overall were of the highest quality, and made excellent additions to my library.

Gradually, however, the modern world intruded on this paradise.  The books remained -- and still remain -- excellent in every respect.  But they became increasingly less idiosyncratic, and -- in appearance -- obviously far more the result of modern mass production.  Books were no longer published once a month; the prospectus began listing larger and larger numbers of books per year.  In recent years, a prospectus came out several times a year, with ever larger numbers of books being offered.  And the titles were no longer limited to fairly obscure works of British and classical history and literature -- they now include everything from sci fi and fantasy to science and contemporary American fiction.

So what, you ask?  Sounds like great books and lots of variety.  And you're right.  The Folio Society continues publishing excellent books, and I've continued buying them.  But today's notice that "membership" will be abandoned because the concept of membership interferes with sales to the mass reading public destroys my all-too-elitest reason for joining the club in 1980, and for looking forward each summer to receiving the next prospectus -- the sense that I was participating in a small society devoted to production and purchase of books not readily available to, or read by, the mass market.

Today, of course, everything is available to the mass market.  We no longer live in 1947, when paper was first becoming available again for such frivolities as the publication of books with no military use.  It must have seemed almost deliciously sinful to use paper for books as frivolous as the three books published during Folio's first year:

Tolstoy, Tales
George du Maurier, Trilby
Aucassin and Nicolette

And so it goes.  Nothing is certain but change.  Best wishes to the Folio Society, as it now publishes as a normal book publisher.  I'll still be buying its books, whatever its incarnation -- just not with the same quiver of excitement as in the days when I could claim "membership."