The Clube do Livro, the first Brazilian book club, was enormously successful, achieving a print run of 50,000, massive by Brazilian standards. It aimed its publications at a non-book buying market of lower middle-class readers and adapted its texts for this audience. The article looks at the alterations which were made, the strong attitude of paternalism its prefaces and footnotes took towards readers, and the ways in which the Clube do Livro followed, or had to follow, the ideology of the Brazilian governments through which many of its copies were sold.