Read anything interesting lately?

Remember those ads in the middle of TV Guide where the issue was stapled together, ads for the book of the month club or the record of the month club or a plastic model of the Apollo spacecraft, printed in color on heavier stock with a perforated reply card? Sure, we all do! If you're like me (and, once again, I hope you aren't), you probably found it hard to resist tearing out the card, folding it back and forth along the perforation until it came off without tearing the rest of the ad, even if you didn't have any intention of sending it in. (I used to use them as bookmarks.)
It's always fun to find one of these intact and unmarked in an old issue. It's another of those time capsule deals; it's fascinating to look at an ad for a book club and see what kind of books people read: how novels weren't all action or adventure or romance but actually dealt with ideas; and how nonfiction books were about history or biography or the works of Shakespeare. And people actually read them! (Or at least impressed their friends, who would think they had read them, which is interesting in and of itself.)
The issue of July 20, 1968, which we looked at last Saturday, has one such ad, and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at it. How many of these books do you remember? 


















Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls was a big best-seller back then; there was something scandalous and forbidden about it, even though Truman Capote supposedly called it "typing, not writing." E.M. Nathanson's The Dirty Dozen had just been turned into a movie the month before, so a lot of people would be interested in the book. There are classics like Gone With the Wind and Of Human Bondage, authors like John O'Hara, Catherine Marshall, Chaim Potok, and James Jones; favorites from TV like Art Linkletter and Alfred Hitchcock, and Bruce Catton's Civil War trilogy. There's true crime: books about high-profile accused murderers like Carl Coppolino and the Boston Strangler. And you can't beat five for 99 cents!
My mother belonged to a book club, so I recognize many of these books. Back then I read everything I could find about World War I flying aces, and Eddie Rickenbacker was an early hero of mine, so she got the Rickenbacker autobiography you see on page one. (I still have it, too; it's a fascinating book.) She also had Michel, Michel; I never read that, but it's the kind of story you don't see much in novels today, about a Jewish boy raised as a Catholic in World War II, who now has to decide which faith he will follow. I don't recognize any others, but I know we had many; several of the JFK biographies that were written in the aftermath of his death (my mother knew I'd be interested in them someday), and novels like Paradise Falls and Five Smooth Stones. I don't know what they were about, but I remember the spines. Again, a look at a time long past.
So what about you? Did your family belong to a book club? Did you read any of these?  TV