Book launch: Nicola Wilson’s “Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read”

Join us or online on Tuesday, 15 July 2025 (4pm-5pm BST) for the launch event for Nicola Wilson’s new monograph:

Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
(Holland House Books, 2025)

Author: Nicola Wilson (CBCP / University of Reading)
Discussant: Claire Battershill (University of Toronto)
Chair: Sophie Heywood (CBCP / University of Reading)

This event is free & open to all.

To join us via MS Teams, please register here.

Before Reese Witherspoon and Zoella’s Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This is the story of Britain’s first celebrity book club and the judges who changed how we read.

For forty years between 1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail out one book a month – fiction, history, travel, or biography – to subscribers in over thirty countries. The judges established what a good ‘book club book’ looked like: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time and money in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they started a revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelves today.

Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden were the literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives, affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal and professional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war. They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and the growth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, and World War Two.

Recommended! explores how a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever how we buy and think about books.

“A deeply researched, stylishly written piece of narrative history, full of detail and telling vignettes. The organisation – around the five characters at the heart of the Book Society – works wonderfully, giving an emotional richness to the story.

An enormous pleasure to read, while also deepening immeasurably my understanding of the literary business of the interwar period out beyond the well-walked squares of Bloomsbury.”
Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the
Recommended! – The Book Society 1929-69

Author:
Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading, co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and a founding director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Her research is in the history of reading, book history, and working-class writing. Her first book was Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Routledge, 2015) – reviewed in the TLS as an important contribution to the study of working-class writing – and she is co-author of Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has edited three academic books including, most recently, The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024), edits an Elements strand for Cambridge University Press on ‘Women, Publishing, and Book Cultures’. Over many years, Nicola has worked to get the writings of Lancashire mill-woman Ethel Carnie Holdsworth back into print.

Discussant:
Dr Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the history and future of the book. Specifically, her work examines relationships between feminist experimental publishing, literary aesthetics, and practices of book making in 20th and 21st-century literature.

Professor Battershill is a Co-Director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishers’ records, the author of a collection of short stories, Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014) and the Co-Creator of ‘Make Believe,’ a collaborative research-creation project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her most recent books are Women and Letterpress Printing: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (revised 2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2022).

Book details:
Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
Format: Hardback (300 pages)
ISBN: 978-1-7391047-5-7
Price: £14.99
Tel: 0845 862 1730
Email: sales@signaturebooksuk.com

Holland House Books: Recommended! | Holland House Books 
Publication Date: 26th June 2025