What to do about “best-sellers” has become a constant bother to the book publishers. Offhand you might suggest that as long as a publisher had on his list a book that was selling very well he should be sanguine about it, but the problem is not as simple as that. Through the constant publication of best-sellers lists, the books in most demand receive a great deal of publicity that is refused to other publications and this has resulted in a situation that is unhealthy for these other books.
It is known only too well that the public is herd-minded. Bestseller lists tell a prospective reader the one thing he wants to know—what the other fellow is reading—which means that other books which have not gotten off to a fast start are neglected. Even though a book receives favorable reviews by the best critics in the land, the timid reader, and most of them fall into that classification when it comes to selecting a book, will not take the plunge until they are sure everybody else is reading the same book. It might be said that this is not a fatal defect in the system but that would be before you had examined the type of book that gets on the best-seller lists.
HICKS SURVEY ON TASTES
The reading tastes of the American public are low. Granville Hicks in a brilliant article which appears in “The English Journal,” October issue, points this out conclusively. He has examined the best sellers of the past three decades and comes not only to that conclusion but has found out some other disturbing facts about America’s interest in books. According to his calculation, only 6 million people in the United States out of a total population of 120 million, are book readers. This small percentage is not a measure of the circulation of a book because in the last ten years there has not been one single book which has sold in excess of 500 000 copies. The nearest approach to that figure was “Anthony Adverse” which may have reached a total of 400,000. In fact, in the last hundred years there have been only sixty-five books which reached the half-million sales class and of this number only three or four were published after 1900.
POPULAR NOVELS
But more interesting than Mr. Hicks’ statistics are his findings on the type of book that Ameri-
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
