Reed Gallery exhibition: Left vs. Right: The Battle of the Book Clubs

Without bullets and bloodshed, chaos and mayhem, please visit the Reed Gallery, Heritage Collections, 3rd floor, Dunedin Public Library, and view the ‘Battle of the Books’, with arch-rivals and combatants the Left Book Club vs the Right Book Club. Watch George Orwell and Arthur Koestler and the rest fight fascism and the war and poverty against Laurence Housman and Ward Price and their gang who fought against Socialism, Communism and Left propaganda. At one point, Victor Gollancz’s The Left Book Club had 57,000 members; Christina Foyle’s Right 50,000. The formation of both was a publishing phenomenon in Britain in the 1930s; a ‘battle royal’.

The books on display represent the largest holdings of such materials in Australasia. And not surprisingly, New Zealand had its active forces involved too. There is no need for gas masks or uniforms!