A FEELING FOR BOOKS: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.<i> By Janice A. Radway</i> .<i> University of North Carolina Press: 410 pp., $29.95</i>

Twenty years ago when I worked in the used-book trade, my partner and I would often spend several days a week buying books. Mainly we took calls from retirees who were moving and from widows, people of a certain generation. There were, to be sure, occasional surprises, but more times than I can count we were led to neatly arranged shelves in their homes that featured the same 100 or so books. A nudge would do for a grimace, an unvoiced ironic exclamation: Book Club editions! It happened so often that I sometimes fancied I was looking at our collective mental life in its material incarnation.

In her ambitiously titled study, “A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire,” Janice A. Radway systematically takes on what I registered only as strong inklings. Adapting an alternately subjective and academically distanced approach, she explores the phenomenon of culture-by-subscription, in particular, an enterprise that appears to have succeeded not in spite of, but because of, the core contradiction of quasi-aesthetic ideals and a cunningly mercantile approach.

Matters are complicated and made a good deal more interesting by Radway’s own ambivalence. Though she is a professor of literature at Duke University and can do theory-patter with the best of them, she confesses a deep connection with the club right at the outset.

In 1963, when she was an adolescent, Radway spent a year bedridden with scoliosis. A devoted librarian sent her boxes of books to read: Book-of-the-Month Club selections all. She devoured, lived, books like “Marjorie Morningstar” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” high-propulsion narratives with strong dramatic appeal. Then, years later, when she was in graduate school, Radway joined the club to get the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary that was offered as a premium. But instead of quitting, she stayed on, cultivating a shadow path of reading that in many ways ran counter to the academic ideals she was preparing to serve.

Radway’s confusion, her sense of self-division, eventually drove her to examine the middlebrow reading experience using the tools at her disposal. Her previous book, “Reading the Romance,” explores romance novels and their readership. She begins “A Feeling for Books” with her account of the day in April 1985 when she travels to New York to meet with officers of the club. She wants permission to carry out a close-up examination of the history, the structure and the procedures of this powerful taste-making institution. More broadly, Radway wants “to understand the peculiar cultural power associated with . . . acquiring, owning, reading, and talking about books in the United States in the twentieth century.”

Meeting with club chairman Al Silverman, executive editor William Zinsser and others, Radway feels that she has been ushered into a benignly civilized environment. Here books are reverently displayed and enthusiastically discussed. Fresh from years of graduate seminars, Radway is delighted as well as intrigued. Everything is serious, genteel; she hears no talk of the bottom line; her proposal is received favorably.

As it turns out, the club was then on the brink of major changes. When Radway, funded for research, returns in June 1986, there is anxiety everywhere. Directives are coming down from Time Inc., the corporate parent. Membership is to be increased. New people have been brought in. It is the dismayingly familiar story of our times.

In “A Feeling for Books,” Radway brings together a number of related subjects. On one level, the book is about her own sense of conflict, her deep-seated ambivalence about academic practice as activated by the engaged but unpretentious conversations she had with club editors. She sees how their subjective responses impinge in crucial ways on their decision-making, such as allowing certain high-brow selections--a Nadine Gordimer novel, say--to become club offerings. On another level, she retails the history of the organization, finding ways to make the narrative compelling as well as informative. Alas, she also has it in mind to take on various abstract issues, such as taste, organizational mentalities and so on. At these moments the prose becomes enslaved to Concept, and Radway’s various agendas feel crushed together.

The club began as the brainchild of Harry Scherman, who as early as 1916 was marketing Leatherette editions of Shakespeare’s plays with boxes of Whitman’s Candy. Before long, Scherman saw more advantageous approaches. Severing books from candy and breaking from the closed system of classics, he devised the scheme of selling new books, an infinitely renewable product, on a regular subscription basis. His trial-and-error maneuvers show us a first-rate marketing intelligence at work. Radway takes us inside the process of picking the first panel of judges--Henry Cancy, William Allen White, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Heywood Hale Broun, iconic figures of their day--and we begin to appreciate how cannily Scherman read the mind of his potential audience.

The club was the right thing at the right time; in 1926, the year of its founding, about 40,000 subscribers joined. Scherman knew, Radway believes, to market his books as “a synecdoche for modernity.” A vast emergent middle class was just coming to covet the tokens of culture. Scherman’s distinguished yet credibly human judges were there to help subscribers make their way through the bewildering onslaught of new books. No less important, if slightly less tangible, was the appeal of what Radway calls “middlebrow personalism.” The club, she writes, “[c]onstructed a picture of the world that, for all its modern chaos, domination by abstract and incomprehensible forces and worries about standardization, was still the home of idiosyncratic, individual selves.”

Naturally there was criticism, and it ranged from the earliest complaints about the standardization of taste to critic Dwight MacDonald’s screeds in the 1960s against the triumph of the middlebrow ethos. Radway gives time to all claimants, at times seeming to let the critical judgments of others stand in place of her own valuations, as when she writes that for many, the most troubling thing about the club “was not simply its proximity to lowbrow culture. . . . Rather, what was troubling was its failure to maintain the fences cordoning off culture from commerce, the sacred from the profane, and the low from the high.” I can’t tell in this instance where disinterested reportage breaks off and personal assessment begins. Does Radway herself approve the skeptics she invokes?

In the latter part of the book, Radway starts to drift from the contours of her immediate subject. She dilates on the myriad attendant issues--like gender and standardization--and the juice evaporates from her language. “By feminizing the new forces of production that so threatened individuated, male self-hood at this time,” she begins, and at once the eyelids feel the pull of gravity.

Radway recovers herself in the final chapter, however, as she takes a closer look at some of the books that so influenced her in her younger years. The tone becomes more intimate and the observations grow evocative. The prose, one might say, manifests Radway’s own self-dividedness. Of “Marjorie Morningstar” she reflects: “Perhaps this last image of Marjorie in her blue dress, kissing under the lilacs, was the source of these feelings of possibility the title evoked for me over the years, the preservative behind that amber-tinted picture of Marjorie crossing a Manhattan street at dusk into the unknown.”

In Radway’s afterword, the present-day situation of the club is sketched out. We see how the whole organizational structure has been changed in an effort to raise profits. As with so many institutions these days, be they publishers, bookstores or magazines, the outer shell is preserved while the indefinable spirit, the original point of it all, is sacrificed.

“A Feeling for Books,” though not at every turn satisfying, does identify an array of vital issues pertaining to the formation of taste, collective and individual. Some readers will wish for stronger links to our cultural moment; others for more extended personal reflection on how a passionate reader of popular works became a scholar necessarily critical of such naive consumption. But no one who finishes Radway’s study will ever again scan the club’s enticing ads blindly. They will henceforth understand just how such an organization reads its would-be readers. There is reading, in other words, and there is reading--and somewhere, too, there is the chinking of the cash register.