In 1916, Harry Scherman, a copywriter at an advertising agency, cofounded the Little Leather Library, a mail-order service that sold “Thirty Great Books for $2.98.” But Scherman realized that to hook repeat customers, he needed a different model. So in 1926 he launched the Book of the Month Club (BOTM), a subscription service featuring a title each month that he hoped would sell itself by the prestige of being selected. In 1936, BOTM chose then-unknown author Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, which won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and inspired the 1939 blockbuster film of the same name. (In 2014 a Harris Poll survey found Mitchell’s novel to be the second favorite book of American readers, just shy of the Bible.) Twenty years after launching with four thousand subscribers, BOTM had grown to at least 550,000 members. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, one of the best-selling and most censored books of the twentieth century, was a 1951 pick; Nelson DeMille’s 1978 thriller By the Rivers of Babylon catapulted to best-seller status after being selected. Book of the Month Club, for most of the twentieth century, was a major tastemaker in American letters.
Yet by 2012, almost ninety years later, the company was faltering, primarily reduced to selling books at bargain-bin prices from its print catalogue. Amazon’s meteoric rise in the early aughts meant that customers no longer turned to BOTM as a source of affordable literature. Entrepreneurs John Lippman and Blake Orlandi, who had recently acquired the business, knew that they had to make a big change: They shut down the business completely and restarted from scratch, carrying over nothing except the name. But Lippman and Orlandi knew that they had enormous potential in this legacy company. “It had worked for ninety years,” says Orlandi, “so there was a good chance it would work again.”
When the business relaunched in 2015, its site design featured a minimal interface, emphasizing personalization rather than the warehouse aesthetic of Amazon. BOTM now presents itself as a high-quality, highly focused library. Instead of emphasizing discounts and prices, Lippman and Orlandi pivoted BOTM to discovery and curation—and the glow-up worked. Today BOTM is thriving, with over four hundred thousand monthly subscribers, most of whom are Gen Z and millennial women.
From the first to the sixth of each month, BOTM members select one of the five to seven new monthly options presented on the app, which are curated across several rotating genres: fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction, romance, crime, mystery, and so on. Then members’ selections get shipped to them in a bright blue box emblazoned with “Book” or “Book of the Month.” If you don’t want a book in a particular cycle, your credit rolls over to the following month.
In addition to its monthly subscription, BOTM hosts the Lolly, an unusually structured annual book award. Unlike most prizes, with a panel of authors as judges, for the Lolly, BOTM’s editorial team selects a list of twenty books across all genres of BOTM picks, and then members vote on the finalists and winners.
Getting a book selected as a BOTM title generally won’t catapult that author to the best-seller list, but it can connect these writers, and in particular debut novelists, with a readership that they would not have necessarily reached on their own. For Mariam Rahmani, whose debut novel, Liquid (Algonquin Books, 2025), was a March 2025 BOTM pick in literary fiction, the highlight of the experience was a letter she received from the editorial team about why they had selected the title. “Given that Book of the Month is so classic, it was a sweet moment,” says Rahmani.
BOTM has embraced both the analog and digital worlds of publishing. On the one hand, the company has invested deeply in the print experience. Each BOTM selection gets printed as an exclusive hardcover edition. On the other hand, the company works closely with more than five hundred influencers to spread the word about selected titles and the BOTM service more broadly. “Can I say it’s always the best day of the month when it arrives on your doorstep,” gushes Jack Edwards, a British YouTube personality with over a million and a half followers. Unboxing the company’s signature blue packaging has become a highly popular activity to stream in the social media book world.
But BookTok doesn’t uniformly praise BOTM. In 2020 the company faced backlash for selecting American Dirt (Flatiron Books) by Jeanine Cummins, which received allegations of appropriation from many members of the Latinx community. Rather than pulling American Dirt from its roster, BOTM doubled down, explaining via an open letter to subscribers, “While thoughtful people have raised important and valid criticisms of this book, we think it is more productive to encourage conversations around these issues than to sweep them under the rug.” Several partnering influencers and members have also criticized BOTM’s June 2025 selection of James Frey’s Next to Heaven (Authors Equity), citing not only the allegations of fabrication that swirled around his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003), but even more vociferously the author’s public statements that he uses AI to aid his writing. Citing why she stopped partnering with BOTM, Rachel A. Dawson, who runs the social media account and blog All the Rad Reads, says, “I don’t believe we should be putting our money behind AI-written books.” (Frey and his publishers claim that the author did not use AI to compose Next to Heaven.)
But BOTM hasn’t shied away from this kind of controversy. Ultimately the company wants readers to have conversations about books. “Nobody Reads Anymore” is the wry tagline of BOTM’s campaign advertising its centennial; the ads feature photographs of primarily millennial and Gen Z readers staring directly into the camera, clutching hardcovers.
Every generation wrings its hands over declining literacy—“Fiction’s feverish funeral procession is not new,” says the BOTM manifesto—but BOTM declares that “these predictions were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.” Indeed, as BOTM’s analog products continue to gain traction and spark debate, the next hundred years promise many more unboxings to come.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022), Thinking Inside the Box (Penguin Press, 2020), and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). She teaches at Baruch College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
