Toothbrushes of the mind:
a very short history of Booktrust

In 1921, Hugh Walpole, the successful author of Rogue Herries, gathered together at his Regent’s Park home a number of notable people (publishers Stanley Unwin and Maurice Marston, author John Galsworthy and politician Harold Macmillan among them) to found the Society of Bookmen.

The Society’s aim was ‘the advancement of literature by the cooperation of the various branches of the book trade’. At one of the Society’s early meetings, it was proposed that a National Book Council should be formed; several years and many arguments later, the first meeting of the newly formed National Book Council took place in Eastbourne on 11 September 1924.

An early editorial in an NBC News Sheet declared, ‘we all inculcate in our children a belief in the toothbrush; we can just as easily make them believe in books, which are toothbrushes of the mind’. To this end, authors were asked to write articles for newspapers; clergy and social and political organisations were encouraged to recommend books; and railway and shipping companies were invited to include information about relevant books in their brochures.

Public libraries and educational authorities were also approached, and parents and teachers were exhorted to foster the reading habit in the young. Much of Booktrust’s work is still dedicated to this essential and worthy cause.

Books are good things

Although the Council was primarily funded by publishers and booksellers, and therefore open to accusations that it was a trade organisation, its existence was predicated on the belief that the book was a good thing. Book lists on a wide range of specialist subjects were commissioned. For 13 years, the Council managed the distribution of the new ‘book tokens’.

An increasingly important part of the Council’s work involved promoting subject-specific (eg Travel; Religious) Book Weeks and organising book exhibitions. Boys’ and Girls’ Book Week in 1932 was celebrated with an exhibition of English Illustrated Books for Children, which was opened at the V&A Museum by the Princess Royal and ran for a month. At the same time, many towns across the country ran their own exhibitions, just as today schools and libraries promote Children’s Book Week using resources provided by Booktrust.

Wartime activities

In 1938 the enthusiastic John Masefield was installed as President, and the Duke of Kent as Patron. With these illustrious figures in place, the Council decided in the following year to expand its activities, but the coming of war changed these plans. Instead, the Council, boosted by words of encouragement from Mrs Neville Chamberlain (among others), focused on the power of books to inform and entertain during this taxing time.

A ‘Books and Freedom Exhibition’, designed in association with the Ministry of Information, opened two days after the outbreak of the Blitz. Wartime News Sheets became less literary, encouraging readers to buy books about, for example, how to grow your own food, and more tactical: foreign guidebooks, they suggested, could provide useful information for Allied bomber pilots.

In the final years of the war, plans were put in place to transform the Council into the National Book League, in an attempt to open up the membership of the organisation not just to the book trade but to anyone interested in books and reading.

A new home in Piccadilly

This was a masterstroke. By 1945 the League had a non-trade membership of 5,000 people, many of whom contributed to a building fund for the renovation of new, potentially swanky, premises in Albemarle Street, just off Piccadilly. (Previously, the Council had had to make do with tiny offices in a number of locations.) Work began on the semi-derelict early eighteenth-century building – with its central hall and elliptical staircase rising to a gallery – on the day the Labour Party swept to power in the July 1945 election.

It was here at No. 7 Albemarle Street that the League held its wonderful post-war exhibitions, many of which were attended by Queen Mary. Subjects included (League member) George Bernard Shaw, to celebrate his 90th birthday; English Poetry; French Books; and Victorian Fiction. Albemarle Street, with its club-like atmosphere, was abuzz with activity.

In preparation for the 1951 Festival of Britain, the NBL was appointed as one of four constituent bodies on the Festival’s administrative council (the Arts Council was another). The League organised a grand exhibition at the V&A to celebrate how much of British achievement, character and tradition had been created by the printed word. It was a huge success.

Campaigning years

At this time – and throughout the 1950s – the League was also concerned with the quality of provision of textbooks for schools. Information about how much, or how little, was being spent on books by the state and the municipalities was collated for the first time. Jack Morpurgo, the director at the time, was much consulted by the Department of Education up to ministerial level. Fifty years later, Booktrust’s research into school spending in libraries was similarly influential, garnering much media interest

The NBL continued in this campaigning spirit by encouraging manufacturers to bring books into factories. A major exhibition entitled Books for Industry was mounted in Cardiff in 1961;

Authors were asked to write articles for newspapers; clergy and social and political organisations were encouraged to recommend books; and railway and shipping companies were invited to include information about relevant books in their brochures.

the following year, the Work and Leisure exhibition toured English cities in collaboration with the Trades Union Congress. It was a long way from Mayfair to Gateshead, but the National Book League was no ivory-towered organisation, holed up in London, supping fine wines and nibbling on sweetmeats.

Other work in similar vein was carried out in the late 1950s and the 1960s. UNESCO paid for the director to visit India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma to make a feasibility study of the need for books in those countries; following his visit, the Pakistan government set up its own National Book Trust.

Later, Morpurgo visited Canada, where he was warmly received. This international perspective to the League’s work is reflected in Booktrust’s current links with EU READ, an affiliation of like-minded European book organisations, as well as in the many Bookstart schemes that have sprung up across the world, from Flanders to Japan.

Closer to home, the NBL looked into provision of books in the National Health Service, and set up a Scottish committee. Although Booktrust and Scottish Book Trust are now independent organisations, they retain strong links, working closely with each other on the Story project.

Behind this pioneering bustle of activity lay the perennial problem of cashflow. A decline in publisher contributions and private membership fees and an increase in rent in the early to mid 1960s led to a retrenchment in facilities (and floor space) at Albermarle Street, and a reduction in the output of publications.

Shoring up the finances

The League needed a bold leader to help it out of this crisis and it got one. Martyn Goff, best known now as the administrator of the Booker Prize (and also perhaps as a repository of book trade gossip par excellence), took over as chief executive in 1969. He was keen to seek alternative, public, funding and to broaden what he saw as the League’s essentially elitist, literary clientele. He successfully wooed the Arts Council for funding , which allowed the organisation to move in new directions.

Freed from the dependence upon publishers for cash, the League was able to set up the New Fiction Society (a non-profit making book club) and the School Bookshop Association . It also added the administration of the Booker Prize to that of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, which it had been part-running for several years. Subsequently, the League added a further 14 prizes to its portfolio, including the Rowntree-Mackintosh Award for children’s literature (later known as the Smarties Prize and later still as the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize).

Throughout the 1970s, money continued to be a concern, and despite the best efforts of many famous names associated with the League – author Angus Wilson succeeded publisher Mark Longman in the chair, who in turn was followed by Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble – the organisation was forced to sell its biggest asset, the freehold on No. 7 Albemarle Street.

Off to Wandsworth

A generous offer of help from the Unwin Foundation was accepted, which saw the National Book League leave central London to cross the river to new premises in the old Wandsworth town hall. Book House, as it became known, at the top of East Hill next to a Huguenot cemetery, is still Booktrust’s home today.

The club-like conviviality of Albemarle Street was gone forever, and fewer staff were required at Book House, but the work of promoting books and reading continued. A change of name in the mid 1980s gave the organisation the more modern-sounding title Book Trust, shortened in 2001 to the even more modern-looking Booktrust.

Booktrust in the 21st century

Today, Booktrust is in a stronger position than its forebears could ever have imagined. The Arts Council continues to support our work, and the implementation of the Bookstart scheme has brought in funding from the government. Since 1999 Bookstart has given away nearly eight million book to babies; our more recent book gift programmes (Booktime and Booked Up) continue this work for 4-5 and 11-12 year-olds respectively.

In addition, Booktrust receives grants from other organisations to run campaigns such as The Letterbox Club (for children in foster care), Get London Reading, and Story; and literary prizes, among them the Orange Prizes for Fiction. We are proud to continue our long association with the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and we fund our own Early Years Awards and Booktrust Teenage Prize.

Our work with the education sector is as important now as it was in the 1950s. We have worked hard as part of the Writing Together partnership to get writers into schools, and our Everybody Writes scheme provides a range of resources for teachers to promote writing in schools as a skill for living.

Booktrust has embraced new technologies that couldn’t have been dreamt of by Hugh Walpole over 80 years ago. The internet has given us the opportunity to promote books in new ways – our websites recommend thousands of titles for readers of all ages, and all for free.

It is no longer necessary to pay a membership fee to access the information provided by the present-day descendant of the National Book Council/League, but Booktrust’s values remain true to those of our high-minded forebears: to provide ‘toothbrushes of the mind’ for everyone, no matter what their interests or circumstances.

Much of this brief history is taken from Sixty Precarious Years: A Short History of the National Book League 1925-1985 by Ian Norrie (National Book League, 1985).

Additional text by James Smith