‘A superb library at bargain cost’
Britain’s Jazz Book Club, 1956–67
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.24716Keywords:
British jazz, book clubs, jazz fan culture, jazz historyAbstract
Offering access to low-cost authoritative literature, the Jazz Book Club was a successful and influential venture, publishing 66 subscription titles and 11 occasional volumes between 1956 and 1967. The Club was created to meet the demand for information by the rapidly growing post-war jazz audience in Britain. Extending the intellectual discourse of the 1930s, an educated, socially diverse generation coming to jazz in the 1940s and 1950s was serious about the music and earnest in their pursuit of information. Although the new fans were often fiercely partisan in their preferences, the Club believed its book choices would appeal broadly across the emerging jazz community. Surprisingly, the Jazz Book Club has been little researched. Using previously unexamined archival records and Jazz Book Club publications, contemporary journals and personal recollections alongside recent scholarship, this article provides the first full account of a small but important moment in British jazz history. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s epistemology of generations, I argue that the Jazz Book Club was created to meet the demands of a young post-war generation for whom jazz assumed an unexampled measure of cultural saliency. The Jazz Book Club’s moment passed as a later generation turned away from jazz after the early 1960s.
References
Archival sources
Hot News [HN], 1935.
Jazz Book Club Jazz Column [JC], 1956–67, National Jazz Archive, Loughton, Essex and National Jazz Archive Satellite Collection at Birmingham City University, Arts, Design and Media Archive.
Jazz Monthly [JMo], 1956–67.
Jazz Music [JMu], 1956–57.
Jazz News [JN] (later Jazz News and Review), 1956–67.
Melody Maker [MM], 1956–67.
National Jazz Archive Intergenerational Jazz Reminiscence Project.
Sidgwick & Jackson, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
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Personal interviews
Anthony Barnett, conversation with the author, 29 July 2022.
Digby Fairweather, correspondence with the author, 6 October 2022.
John Fowle, correspondence with the author, 28 September 2022.
Graham Langley, correspondence with the author, 27 July 2022.
Alan Parr, correspondence with the author, 16 August 2022.
Alysoun Sanders, correspondence with the author, 20 July 2022.
Peter Vacher, correspondence with the author, 6 August 2022.
