[1] Started by Donald Webster Cory, born Edward Sagarin, the service consisted of an LGBT mailing list in 1950s America which sent subscribers queer book recommendations and sometimes deeply discounters offers direct from publishers.
Instead, Cory would select books and send the titles to readers to guide reading and learning about the gay community.
"[6] Greenberg's vice-president Brandt Aymar started collecting a list of all the customers made personal orders for the book or who wrote in asking about queer titles hoping to use it to further tap into the gay market.
Cory also received significant amount of reader mail, giving Aymar the ideal to pool those contacts with the existing "H" list.
The subscription list grew primarily through word of mouth and connections with other queer groups at the time, including the Mattachine Society and ONE magazine, which the service also promoted and help grow.
Cory hired a legal team to vet books before sharing them on the service, a possible reason that they managed to initially avoid censorship.
[7] In 1954, Arthur Richmond, a book publisher, bought the mailing list from Cory but continued to run it in his name without public knowledge of the change in operations.
[3] In 1967, Carlton sold the service again, to a professor named Russell Hoffman, who added news articles and travel tips to the book suggestions.
Despite that, it played an important role in growing other essential organizations and helped queer people find each other through books before a mainstream activist movement had fully emerged.
"[5] The Cory Book Service played a related role, allowing people to discover each other and their own sexuality in an even less public way.