Axel Gerhardt Rosin, 99; former president of Book-of-the-Month club

Axel Gerhardt Rosin, 99, a former president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, died Tuesday at his New York City home.

His father-in-law, Harry Scherman, founded the club in 1926 on the premise that readers craved easy access to books. The company has distributed more than 570 million books through the mail in the U.S., according to the Encyclopedia of Company Histories.

Rosin was the club’s president from 1960 to 1973 and its chairman until he retired in 1979. During his tenure, membership reached 1.25 million and annual sales reportedly doubled to $65 million.

With the increase in retail bookstores and paperback books, membership started stagnating in the 1960s.

Rosin helped fuel the company’s comeback in 1967 by paying $250,000 -- about $1.5 million in today’s dollars -- for the right to make William Manchester’s account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “The Death of a President,” a club selection.

Rosin was born in 1907 in Berlin. He graduated with a law degree from a Berlin university and immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.

In 1943, he married Katharine Scherman, a nonfiction writer, and became comptroller of her family’s company two years later.

Rosin also was chairman emeritus of the Scherman Foundation, which has awarded more than $100 million to various causes since 1940.