• Varieties
• Examples
• The Club
• The Other Club
• The Inklings
• The Transcendental Club
• Saturday Club
• The Junto or Leather Apron Club
• Wicht Club
• Bloomsbury Group
• The Dry Club
• Coefficients
• Tots and Quots
• Olympia Academy
• Stratford-on-Odeon
• The Algonquin Roundtable
• The Dymock Poets
• The February House
• The Select Society

Varieties

• Debating societies
• Salons
• Dining clubs
• Artist collectives
• Social clubs (e.g. gentlemen's or women's clubs)

Examples

The Club

• Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmunt Burke
• 1764
• Initially once a week at 7 at an inn, then every other week during Parliament sessions
• 9 original members
• New membership by unanimous selection only
• 12 members at steady state during Johnson's time was considered optimal, then got to 21 and then 35, original members stopped attending
• "It was intended the Club should consist of Such men, as that if only Two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other without wanting the addition of more Company to pass the Evening agreeably."
• Johnson wanted a group "composed of the heads of every liberal and literary profession" and "have somebody to refer to in our doubts and discussions, by whose Science we might be enlightened."

The Other Club

• Started by Churchill and FE Smith when they were too controversial for The Club (above)
• 1911
• The initial membership was 12 Liberals, 12 Conservatives, and 12 "distinguished outsiders" who were not in politics

• Election to the club depended on Smith and Churchill believing members to be "men with whom it was agreeable to dine". After Smith's death in 1930, Churchill became practically the sole arbiter and election was the greatest honour he could confer on those he considered both estimable and entertaining

The Inklings

• CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, etc
• Informal, no rules or anything
• Began among junior scholars in a college so CS Lewis and others could read their work (non-scholarly) to each other
• Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings
• Initial meetings were Thursday evenings in CS Lewis's college rooms in Magdalen College
• Would also meet at the Eagle and Child midday on Tuesdays

The Transcendental Club

• Emerson, Thoreau
• 1836
• Was started to get together when a friend from Maine was visiting
• Was a protest, trying to create space for new thinking other than the predominant environment at Harvard
• no one should be admitted "whose presence excluded any one topic."
• Irregular meetings, at houses or hotels
• Tended to center on a single topic - "American Genius," "Education of Humanity," Religion vs Ethics, etc

Saturday Club

• 1855
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• First started by a lawyer to get friends together for food and conversation
• Became more structured, with monthly meetings at a hotel

The Junto or Leather Apron Club

• 1727
• Benjamin Franklin, who founded it explicitly with rules
• 12 members with a desire to improve themselves and their community
• Friday nights in a tavern and later a house
• Each member in turn proposed a question on morals, politics, or natural philosophy to be produced, and produce and read an essay of his own writing on any subject

Wicht Club

• 1903
• Harvard lecturers, too junior to be in the other, more formal clubs
• Philosophers, physicists, biologists, psychologists
• 10 members
• Met at a restaurant or hotel, away from the university
• Monthly meetings with a presentation of academic work, by a member or an outsider (William James invited several times)
• The academic work was collected into annual volumes

Bloomsbury Group

• 1905
• Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster
• Not an official club, just a group of friends
• Mostly people who were in the Cambridge Club the Apostles and who found themselves living in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London
• One had a Friday Club and another had a Thursday Evenings gathering
• Also met in countryside retreats

The Dry Club

• John Locke
• 1692
• Met weekly to discuss ideas

Coefficients

• 1902
• Monthly dining club
• Usually at someone's home?
• Economists, politicians; Bertrand Russell, HG Wells
• Started by socialists, the goal was to include people from the full range of political beliefs
• That ultimately led to its dissolution as people got offended by each other's opinions
• Discussions on a set theme introduced by one of the group
• Minutes were kept, now at LSE library

Tots and Quots

• 1931
• Liberal scientists in London trying to apply scientific principles to social problems, promote science
• Started to respond to the global depression
• Dining club, ate at different places
• Goal was for members to have their ideas influenced, their creative activities thereby affected and their social relations indirectly widened and altered
• Members would give a speech on a topic

Olympia Academy

Stratford-on-Odeon

Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among the famous writers who comprised Stratford-on-Odeon. The group was so named after the bookshop they frequented called Shakespeare and Company and which James Joyce coined “Stratford-on-Odeon”. Their meeting place was destroyed during World War II.

The Algonquin Roundtable

The Algonquin Roundtable was a group of New York City playwrights, actors, critics and comedians including Harpo Marx, George Kaufman and Dorothy Parker who met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 to 1929.

The Dymock Poets

The Dymock Poets were a group of poets including Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke who lived in the English village of Dymock. These poets met in the early 1900’s and even published their own quarterly called ‘New Numbers’.

The February House

W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers , Paul and Jane Bowl, as well as composer Benjamin Britten, the tenor Peter Pears, and striptease legend Gypsy Rose Lee

It was an actual shared house

The Select Society

David Hume, Adam Smith

To seek out communities of practice, find out who is excited by what you want to learn

https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/