Guild Publishing

About Guild Publishing

Guild Publishing was the imprint carried by hardback book club editions sold to members of Book Club Associates (BCA), the British mail-order book club, during the 1980s.

BCA was set up in 1966, jointly owned by the retailer W. H. Smith and the American publisher Doubleday. At its peak in the 1970s and 1980s its membership was reported to exceed two million. The club bought stock from trade publishers at low, firm-sale prices, often by having the publisher extend its own print run, and sold the books to members at its own reduced price. Many of these copies bore the Guild Publishing name. TolkienBooks.net records, for example, that 4,000 copies of Christopher Tolkien's The Shaping of Middle-earth were printed separately for Guild Publishing alongside the 6,000-copy Allen & Unwin first impression, and that the Guild issues of The Book of Lost Tales appeared in 1986.

Because Guild books are club issues, a Guild copy of a title such as Stephen King's Four Past Midnight or Dean Koontz's Watchers should not be described as the trade first edition, even when the date matches.

Bertelsmann owned BCA until 2008, when it sold the club to the German company Aurelius. Aurelius sold it to the British firm The Webb Group in March 2011, and BCA became insolvent in 2012 after The Webb Group failed.

How to spot a Guild Publishing first edition

Guild Publishing books are book club editions, not trade first editions, so they matter mainly as copies to rule out.

• Look at the foot of the jacket spine and the case spine: club copies carry "Guild Publishing" or "BCA" where the trade publisher's name would normally be.
• The front jacket flap has no printed price, because the club charged members its own price rather than the publisher's.
• Do not rely on the copyright page alone: a Guild or BCA copy can repeat the trade publisher's "First published in" line, and some run-on club copies have indicia identical to the trade first.