SIXTY YEARS OF BEST SELLERS

60 YEARS OF
BEST SELLERS

1895-1955

Alice  Payne  Hackett


NEW YORK, R. R. Bowker Company

1956

Library of Congress Card Number: 56-13419
Copyright, 1956, by R. R. Bowker Company
    62 West 45th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

Printed in the U.S.A. by
Rae Publishing Company

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
to “50 Years of Best Sellers”

The term “best seller” was coined and came into common use because it filled a need. A term was needed to describe what were not necessarily the best books but the books that people liked best. For a long time people have been interested in what other people read and why. If we are studying what books were popular in any period of our history, it is important to know not only what people could have read, or should have read, but what they did read. The record of what books a great many people have bought and read is a part of the social history of those people.

The books which have been important from a literary standpoint have been recorded in many volumes of literary criticism. Many of those books have had large and continuing sales, though some have only been appreciated years after they were published. These great books are the product in which any country must take great pride. On the other hand the record of best sellers of the hundred or more years during which book publishing has been an active industry in this country has not heretofore been adequately made. The record is only in part literary history. A literary classic is a book which continues to be important to succeeding generations of readers. Some of the best sellers of each decade have done that; many more have not. The lists covering a fifty-year period which this volume includes will make interesting material for study. Whether or not literature of continuing value is to be found among the best sellers, the lists provide significant insight into the thinking and emotions of a people. The trends of such reading may have more significance than a casual glance indicates.

How many copies any book has sold is recorded on the files of its publisher, and business records are not readily unearthed. Fortunately, however, the comparative sales of books year by year for the last half century have been kept systematically. The closing of this fifty year{vii}
{viii} period makes a natural occasion for printing the record. The sales totals of books are more difficult to gather and to verify, but such figures, insofar as they have ever been printed, have become part of the historical files of the Publishers’ Weekly office. Alice Payne Hackett, who has had so much to do with the development and completeness of these files, has pursued for her book every figure that could be verified by the files or records in the publishing offices.

Fifty Years of Best Sellers will open up to the student and bookman new fields for speculation. Perhaps students of literary history will try to chart the evolution of public taste from these records and writers of tomorrow’s best sellers find, in these titles of the past, some clue to the perennial elements of popular appeal.

Frederic G. Melcher

1946

FOREWORD
to “60 Years of Best Sellers”

The prompt recognition which was accorded ten years ago to Alice Hackett’s records and comments on best sellers and the demand which has followed for a continuation of her figures and analysis has shown that such records have an interest to widely different groups of people—to the book trade, of course, but also to reminiscent readers and to students of public taste and social history. This continuation of the yearly lists is now accompanied by an expansion of earlier information which Miss Hackett has gathered by persistent contacts with many sources and to these annual lists has been added a greatly extended group of classified lists which enhance the popular interest and usefulness of the book.

Frederic G. Melcher

August 1956

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KEY TO ENDPAPERS

In the upper lefthand corner are the title page and frontispiece of The Royal Road to Romance, which introduced Richard Halliburton as the glamorous traveler of the ’20’s. Next is the title page of H. G. Wells’ most famous best seller, The Outline of History. To its right, and just below it, are pictures of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost, one of our best-loved poets, and of The White Cliffs, by Alice Duer Miller, best-selling poetry of World War II.

At the middle left is Alfred Aloysius Horn, whose fabulous Trader Horn, was a high spot of the ’20’s. Emily Post’s Etiquette in its original and revised editions has been a steady seller for thirty or more years. Just below Etiquette is the famous Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and above it one of the most outstanding religious novels of our time, The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas. At the right is an illustration from one of the earliest best-selling American mystery stories, The Circular Staircase, by the dean of mystery writers, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The bottom row includes a picture of the top seller in religious non-fiction, The Greatest Story Ever Told, by Fulton Oursler; the bestselling novel of this century, God’s Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell, in its paperbound edition; Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care, the overall best seller in paperbound books; and the title page of the first edition of John Brown’s Body, Stephen Vincent Benet’s great narrative poem.

On the right page, at the upper left, is The Honorable Peter Stirling, by Paul Leicester Ford, a sensation of the 1890’s, followed by the title page of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and the double title page of the special pre-publication edition of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat.

Below is the paperbound edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Velvet Claws. In descending order are Rabbi Liebman’s Peace of Mind; The Good Earth, flanked by a picture of its author, Pearl Buck; and Contract Bridge Complete, by the best-selling writer on bridge of the ’50’s, Charles Goren. At the left is{x} the title page of one of the best-known western stories, The Virginian, by Owen Wister.

Along the lowest row are Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking; the jacket of the original edition of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, perennial juvenile favorite; the paperbound edition of One Lonely Night, by the sensational detective writer of the ’50’s, Mickey Spillane; and the new edition of the bestseller among cook books, the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.

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{1}

A GUIDE TO BEST SELLERS

It is the purpose of this book as of its predecessor, Fifty Years of Best Sellers, to present as completely as possible the facts and figures about American best sellers, to interpret and comment to some extent upon the statistics presented but not to evaluate from a literary standpoint.

There is always a great deal of interest and curiosity about best-selling books among members of the general reading public as well as among those concerned with the publishing, selling and publicizing of books. The lists and figures of this book are an attempt to answer the questions of such interested people. In view of the recurrent controversies about the best-seller system, which usually hinge upon the complaint that best seller lists draw attention only to a few books to the disadvantage of what are possibly more worthy books, it must be added that this book is not designed to glorify the best seller per se, but simply to give the facts. As long as newspapers and magazines find best seller lists attractive features for their readers, the best seller will be with us. Even if there were no organized best seller lists, notable sales for a certain book would be news. When a book becomes conspicuous for its fast and unusually large sales, people who are not ordinarily book buyers or not particularly interested in books become aware of it, even buy it. Sales themselves stimulate sales. They cannot be ignored as a factor in the book business.

The term best seller is usually comparative rather than absolute. A book may be the best seller in one store or one city; it may be the best seller over the country for a week, or a year, for five years or for sixty. The words used to designate such a book have become so established in our language and are so often loosely used that “best seller” has too often become synonymous with “book,” especially in circles outside the book industry. Advertisers, magazine editors, and program directors in radio and television, attempting to adhere to fair standards when mentioning books, often query major review media, li{2}braries, trade magazines, book associations, etc. as to whether a certain book may honestly be called a best seller. In the office of Publishers’ Weekly, the book trade magazine where much of the material for this present volume was developed, it has become the practice to answer such questions in the affirmative if that book has appeared on one of its monthly best seller lists, which are based upon bookstore surveys. The book is a best seller for at least the moment at which the question is asked. But is the book of the moment or month a best seller as David Copperfield or Gone with the Wind is a best seller? In the pages following I have attempted to illustrate the various states of best sellerdom.

The reason why the story of best sellers begins in 1895 is that it was in that year that the first best seller lists were printed in the United States. Harry Thurston Peck, then editor of the literary magazine, The Bookman, began to run each month the lists of the best-selling books in a number of large cities. By 1902, “best seller” had been established, mainly through the publicity derived from The Bookman’s lists, as a term specifically applied to books. About 1903 the magazine set the limit of its monthly list of titles at six and called the lists “the six best sellers.” From these Bookman lists were formulated the best seller lists for the years 1895 to 1912 when the Publishers’ Weekly lists were begun. There were few and scattered records of best-selling books previous to 1895. There are occasional lists in early literary magazines, some in Publishers’ Weekly, a few lists of the most popular reading matter in public libraries to be found, but all these give the effect of rather random reporting. Without any methodical listing of best sellers in the years previous to 1895, it is practically impossible to arrive at exact figures of sales for the books of preceding centuries or even at estimates except in the case of the books which have endured. A list of “Early Best Sellers,” most of which have been read for more than a century, is included in this book. It has been checked by a number of authorities, and, while it may possibly not be complete, the titles on it comprise a valid body of best sellers published before 1895.

The first edition of this book covered the years from 1895 to 1945. Since then there have been tremendous changes in the business of{3} bookselling, principally in methods of selling. During and just after World War II more books could have been sold than were available. This was because of paper quotas, shortages in other materials, and wartime demands. Children’s books, especially, sold as fast as they could be placed on sale, for one reason because the metals used in making toys for children were in even shorter supply than paper. All books sold very well in spite of limitations placed upon their manufacture. There were fewer titles published but those that were published and were successful sold out all their printings. At about the time that paper restrictions began to be lifted book clubs boomed. The major clubs had been in existence for a number of years but it was not until the postwar period that all their monthly selections sold into many hundreds of thousands. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed a total of 7,011,936 books in 1950. In its fiscal year of 1950 the Literary Guild sent out about 8,800,000 books. Compare these figures with those estimated by Maxwell Aley in the June 6, 1931 Publishers’ Weekly. He concluded then that there were “one million habitual book buyers, one million more occasional buyers and beyond that a vague but large number who buy one or two books a year.” Because of the popularity of the books in the Armed Services Editions, distributed to men and women in the Armed Services during the war, the book trade hoped that the many new readers of books would continue to read in the postwar years, and that the book boom of the late ’40’s and early ’50’s would continue.

The big totals piled up by the book clubs had a tremendous effect on what I have called the overall best seller lists, the three lists that include books that have sold 750,000 copies or more in the past sixty years. Many books of the mid-century have displaced the favorites of the century’s early years that once were high on the lists. The reading picture given by the list is entirely different from what it was ten years ago.

At almost the same time as wartime demands were creating new best sellers, another tremendous change which affected the overall best seller lists, was taking place in the book business. That was the success of the 25-cent paperbound book. This was not a new develop{4}ment in the trade. In the nineteenth century, in the “dime novel” period, paper bound books had big sales. Dime novels flourished for years. There were also many experiments in later years to launch paperbound lines, but it was not until 1939 that the paperbound book came into its own for moderns. Its success was due to new methods of cheaper manufacture, to new methods of distribution through the magazine wholesaler system, and to improved literary quality of the books chosen for reprint in paper covers.

When the first edition of this book appeared, paperbound books were established but had not yet attained the enormous sales that came later on. There was one “overall” best-seller list, 1895-1945, in Fifty Years of Best Sellers. Both hardbound books, including the reprints at 75 cents and $1 which sold well up to the 1940’s, and paperbound books were lumped together on it. Paperbound sales account for the place of only a few books on the list—books like See Here, Private Hargrove and The Pocket Book of War Humor. That list, made in 1944, was, on the whole, not greatly affected by paperbound book sales. Since then the whole picture has changed enormously. Paperbound sales, both reprints of hardcover editions and books which have made their first appearance in paper covers, account for by far the majority of titles.

That is why, for this new edition, I have arranged the overall list, 1895-1955, in three sections. Students of the book business and of literary taste will find what books have sold to bookstore and book club customers, what titles have sold to the so-called mass market. The evidence is not quite what one would expect. While great numbers of detective and western stories and some sensational fiction on the list are due to paperbound sales, it is also true that paperbound distribution accounts for the appearance of such authors as John Steinbeck and William Faulkner on the overall combined list.

In general the sales figures on these three lists are much larger than those on the 1945 list. The minimum sales figure on that list was half a million copies. On two of the 1955 lists the minimum is one million; on the hardbound list, 750,000. There are also many more titles on these lists than on the 1945 list. Title production has increased{5} every year since the end of the war and the reading population has also increased. While the sales figures for the most popular books are startlingly larger than those of a decade ago, they are not so great as one must believe they could be in relation to growth of population and the increase in high school and college enrollment. Robert Frase, economic consultant and associate director of the American Book Publishers Council, has recently pointed out that this population pattern ought soon to affect the book business favorably even if it has not yet affected it as much as expected. This slow rate of increase in sales, if not in title production, is illustrated by figures Mr. Frase has quoted for trade books sold in 1929 and in 1954. The figures for both years are practically the same, about 70,000,000 copies. Book club sales, however, rose from about 2,000,000 to 50,000,000; paperbacks from zero to 190,000,000; juveniles, at all prices, from 37,000,000 to 95,000,000.

Among trade books, the topmost best sellers are selling in even greater quantities than they did previously, but for the run-of-the-mill books the situation is not so happy. Big best sellers, textbooks, children’s books, and other special types of books are going along at a good rate. The novel or book of non-fiction that may be worthy but is not particularly outstanding has a rougher road. Because of increasing manufacturing costs and the decrease in rental libraries, which once absorbed a creditable number of the ordinary romances and novels designed for a few hours’ diversion, it is difficult for the publisher to sell the unassuming book profitably. Contrary to public assumption, most authors of books do not make much money. They must either write a great many books or else produce a few big best sellers in order to attain satisfactory incomes. Laura Z. Hobson, author of Gentleman’s Agreement and other books, has made the statement that of the 2,000 members of the Authors’ Guild, less than half make an annual income of $3,000 or more from all forms of writing. But an author may not have to live on book sales alone. The sales of subsidiary rights, i.e., rights to use a book as the basis of a movie, television show or condensation, are becoming of more and more importance both to author and publisher; but it is mainly the “big” books that bring in the big money, and they are few and far between. The{6} Desperate Hours, for example, brought its author, Joseph Hayes, a quarter of a million dollars within a very short time—but this included, besides sales of the book and of book club editions, the sale of the play and screen rights, Reader’s Digest condensation and magazine serialization. One book that almost reached the ultimate in all types of sales was The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. It was serialized in Redbook, was a best seller in its trade edition, was both a Literary Guild and a Dollar Book Club best seller, sold in a clothbound $1 reprint and in a 25-cent paperbound reprint, and was produced as a movie. Numerous foreign rights were sold.

Readers may wonder why many, if not most, of the best sellers on the three overall lists do not appear on the annual lists of best sellers, 1895 through 1955, and, conversely, why many of the titles on the yearly lists do not appear on the overall best seller lists. This situation illustrates the difference between the best seller of the year and the all-time best seller. These annual lists as compiled by the Publishers’ Weekly, are primarily for the interest of the retail bookseller. They do not include book club sales or sales in paperbound reprint editions. They are intended to show the reading tastes of the book buyers who actually go to a store to select books, not of those who buy by mail or pick up random reading from newsstands. Most of the books on the annual lists of recent years sell a minimum of about 75,000 copies. It takes several years’ big sales to put one of the books from the yearly lists on the all-time list. Book club sales and paperbound sales will also help do the job.

The reason why many of the books on the all-time lists do not appear on yearly lists is, in general, the same. In the case where book club or paperbound sales do not enter into the situation the books probably have sold steadily, piling up sales over the years until they reach big quantities. This is especially true of the cook books which stand high on the hardbound list; four out of the first five titles on the list are cook books.

These yearly lists are more interesting for the student of social history and literary taste than are the overall lists. They reflect events {7}and crises in history over sixty years as well as the changing mores—from Pollyanna to Polly Adler. There are books on these lists that have made history and influenced American thinking. Consider The Honorable Peter Stirling by Paul Leicester Ford, The Pit by Frank Norris, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells, The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, The Plastic Age by Percy Marks, Mother India by Katherine Mayo, Looking Forward by Franklin D. Roosevelt, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer, The White Cliffs by Alice Duer Miller, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler by Douglas S. Miller, Victory Through Air Power by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, They Were Expendable by W. L. White, One World by Wendell L. Willkie, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith, I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko, Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson, Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis, The Wall by John Hersey, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, But We Were Born Free by Elmer Davis, Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch and Year of Decisions by Harry S. Truman. There are many books which have added new words and phrases to the American language: The Virginian, Pollyanna, Over the Top, Main Street, Babbitt, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Back Street, Life Begins at Forty, Mr. Chips, Lost Horizon, The Hucksters, The Snake Pit, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Some are known by more people because their titles are the titles of songs: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The Rosary, In Flanders Fields, The Sheik, Stars Fell on Alabama, My Sister and I, and The Last Time I Saw Paris.

Of interest to publishers is the number of titles on the annual list that specific firms have issued. The leaders are Doubleday (with predecessor firms), 89; Harper, 80; Houghton Mifflin, 46; Scribner, 43; Little, Brown, 41; Bobbs-Merrill (with predecessor firms) and Macmillan, 40 each; Appleton-Century-Crofts (with predecessor firms), 39; Simon and Schuster, 31; Lippincott (with Stokes), 23; and Dodd Mead, 20. With one exception all these houses were founded in the nineteenth century. Simon and Schuster is the youngest, and its 31 best sellers appear only on the annual lists since 1924. The authors who have had the most titles on the sixty annual lists are Mary{8} Roberts Rinehart with eleven; Sinclair Lewis with ten; Zane Grey and Booth Tarkington with nine each; and Louis Bromfield, Winston Churchill (the American novelist), George Barr McCutcheon, Gene Stratton Porter, and Frank Yerby with eight each. In the first twenty years, 1895-1914, the authors who appeared most frequently were George Barr McCutcheon, with eight titles; Winston Churchill with seven, and Mary Johnston and Sir Gilbert Parker with five each. In the period 1915-1934, Zane Grey led with nine titles. He was followed by Warwick Deeping, Sinclair Lewis, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Booth Tarkington, with seven each, and by Coningsby Dawson, Eleanor H. Porter, Gene Stratton Porter, and H. G. Wells with five each. In the past twenty years, the authors having most titles on the lists are Frank Yerby with eight; Daphne du Maurier, John P. Marquand and John Steinbeck with six each; and Thomas B. Costain, A. J. Cronin, Lloyd C. Douglas, John Gunther, James Hilton, and Frances Parkinson Keyes with five each. The authors whose books have covered the longest span on all the lists are: Ellen Glasgow, whose first best seller appeared on the 1904 list and her last on the 1935 list; Edna Ferber, 1924 and 1952; Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1909 and 1936; Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1896 and 1922; Sinclair Lewis, 1921 and 1947; and Louis Bromfield, 1927 and 1945.

As I have said, literary criticism does not enter into this book; it is a guide to the past and present, and, for those looking toward future best sellers, a starting-point for speculation. It is wise to bear in mind Samuel Butler’s statement: “There are some things which it is madness not to try to know but where it is almost as much madness to try to know. Sometimes publishers hoping to buy the Holy Ghost with a price, fee a man to read for them and advise them. This is but as the vain tossing of insomnia. God will not have any human being know what will sell.” Years ago the formula for a best seller was summed up as Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog—because books about Lincoln, about doctors and about dogs are always popular. Today the title might be amended to How to Be Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog’s Psychiatrist. Or the writer might follow the caption for a drawing by Alan Dunn in the New Yorker, “It can’t miss, J. G.! The author got disillusioned with{9} Communism, escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, came to the United States, lived on a sharecropper’s farm in Georgia, spent a year in a state insane asylum, turned to religion, and now is a monk.”

What best sellers of today will become the classics of tomorrow? Malcolm Cowley has pointed out, in an article in the New Republic (Dec. 22, 1947), “Classics and Best Sellers,” the distinction between a classic (a book admired by intelligent readers through several generations) and a best seller (a book purchased by many readers in one generation). The terms, he says, “are not mutually exclusive—a best seller may become a classic in time, as happened with Dickens’ novels.” In order to try to find out how many of the books on the early years’ lists were at all familiar to today’s young generation, I read the titles and authors’ names to several recent college graduates. Only the most obvious authors were known to most of them, and extremely few titles. The lists were also tried out on freshman English composition classes in a New England college, with equally negative results. I quote from a letter written by the teacher of the classes. “These students are almost completely ignorant of the best sellers you have listed. Occasionally the name of an author may remind them of something they’ve heard their parents discuss. In some cases, they had heard the name of the book, but knew nothing of the author, e.g., Seventeen, If Winter Comes, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.... Generally the best sellers of yesterday are a dead issue to the college freshman of today. The one exception is Gone With the Wind which has had a slight renaissance since the movie was reissued.... My concern is not that these students are ignorant of the best sellers of yesteryear, but that most of them know nothing about contemporary American and English literature. Their ignorance is appalling! Many have read nothing by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Faulkner, Maugham, Hilton, Shaw, etc. A few have read From Here to Eternity and some are at least familiar with the titles of book club books that they have seen around their homes. In school they may have read Arrowsmith, but they have never heard of Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington, Winston Churchill, Willa Cather, or practically anyone since Mark Twain.”

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To relate the material, the facts and figures of this present book up to 1950, to their historical and sociological background, I heartily recommend the reading of James D. Hart’s The Popular Book (Oxford University Press, 1950). For a final word on the whole business of best sellers I quote from his concluding paragraphs. “If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce’s administration, he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter or T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau’s Walden—all books published in 1854. The mores and manners prevailing in the year of the Teapot Dome scandal can better be extrapolated from Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen than from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium. The book that time judges to be great is occasionally also the book popular in its own period; but, by and large, the longer-lived work reflects the demands of the moment only in the most general sense. Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. Books of that sort generally are unreadable for succeeding ages; but like other fragments of the past, they help form the present. The volumes themselves may gather dust on library shelves, but they have left lasting impression on the American mind, etched deeply into a national consciousness.”

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BEST SELLERS
1895-1955

This overall list of best sellers includes books published in the United States from 1895 through 1955, which have, over sixty years, sold one million copies or more. Most of them have appeared in many different editions and in both hardbound and paperbound format. Many have been sold by book clubs, on newsstands, and by mail as well as through bookstores. Most of the titles, with some notable exceptions, represent the most popular reading habit, that is, reading for entertainment. Pamphlets are not included in the list, nor are dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, editions of the Bible, hymnals, prayer books, manuals, textbooks, and certain other books, such as game and novelty books. Best sellers in these specialized fields are, in general, covered under other headings. Children’s books are included when they are primarily juvenile novels and not picture or game books.

Publishers’ names are not given because most of the books have been published by at least two firms and sometimes by five or six or even more. The date of original publication in this country follows the author’s name. “F” indicates fiction, “J” juveniles. Many of the titles listed as juveniles were originally published as adult books, but changing taste has now definitely placed them in the category of juvenile reading, and they are so indicated in accordance with modern standards.

Three hundred and six titles make up this list of books which have sold over 1,000,000 copies in the years since 1895. In the original edition of the present book a somewhat comparable list appeared, an overall best-seller list of books which had sold 500,000 copies or more in the years from 1895 through 1945. There were only 143 titles on that list. The enormous increase in both number of best-selling books, and in sales is due not only to the normal increase in the number of new titles issued in the years since 1945 but in much greater part to the{12} increase in the production and distribution of paperbound books and to the big jump in book club sales during the years immediately after World War II.

This revolution in the make-up of the overall best-seller list has resulted in the elimination of most of the popular books that first appeared in the years up to 1930. There are only 14 titles on the list that were published in the years between 1916 and 1930. Some of the most popular authors of the early part of this century like the novelist Winston Churchill, whose historical tales were the best sellers of almost every year from 1901 through 1915, and Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter, whose names predominated on the earlier list, have all but disappeared from this one. On the other hand, the paperback editions are responsible for the inclusion on this list of many of the books of twenty or so years ago which never had extremely large sales in their hardback editions—books by authors like Erskine Caldwell, Thorne Smith, William Faulkner, and Paul De Kruif. It is the paperbacks, too, that have created the large sales for the many detective and western stories that appear here. In His Steps, Gone with the Wind, and How to Win Friends and Influence People are still right at the top. Some of the older favorites are still here, but much farther down the list than they were, such titles as Pollyanna, The Rosary, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and The Sheik. One hundred and eighteen of these 306 books have been published since 1945, and 43 of them since 1950.

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BEST SELLERS

1895-1955

Hardbound

This list, giving only sales figures for the hardbound editions of the best sellers, is the most comparable in content to the overall bestseller list in the 1945 edition of this book. In the main that original list consisted mostly of hardbound best sellers. Some paperbound editions were included, but when the list was first made, there were only a scattering of these paperbound editions that could be included.

The 1895-1955 list has been limited to books selling 750,000 copies or more in the original edition and in hardbound reprint and in book club editions. There are 147 titles compared to the 144 books in 1945 which had sold 500,000 or more. The names of the original publishers and the dates of original publication in the United States are given. In cases where the original publisher has gone out of business but the book is still in print, the name of the present publisher is given, but if the book itself is out of print, the name of the original publisher is given whether or not the firm is still in existence.

Many of the older titles from the periods before the two world wars are still here. Only those on the original list that have not yet sold 750,000 copies are omitted. Many new books of the ’40’s and ’50’s have been added—58 published in 1945 or later, only 20 of which were published in 1950 or later. There are 19 authors who have two or more books on this list. The leaders in number of titles are Frances Parkinson Keyes with six, Daphne du Maurier, Gene Stratton Porter and Frank Yerby with five each, and Thomas B. Costain and Harold Bell Wright with three each.

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BEST SELLERS

1895-1955

Paperbound

This third list of best sellers, 1895-1955, includes only books which have sold one million or more copies in paper-covered editions. No hardcover sales are included in the totals. There are 173 titles on the list, most of which have sold at prices ranging from 25 cents to 50 cents. The publishers named are the publishers of the paperbound editions. In some cases these books are “originals” that is, they were first issued in paper covers, and not as reprints of hardcover editions. Books in this category are indicated by “(orig)” after the publisher’s name. In a very few cases a book was issued by its original publisher in both paper and hardcover editions. In that case only the sales of the paperbound edition are given.

The most recent development in the paperbound field has been the establishment of reprint series by the regular trade publishers, most of them offering their backlist titles at reduced prices in the new format. The substance of most of these series is more serious from the literary standpoint than the usual offerings of the regular paperbound publishers. One of the good outlets for these paperbound series is the college bookstores whose readers find special books they may have long wished to own but have not been able to afford at their original prices, and also books that may have been out of print in their clothbound editions. This sort of enterprise has been so successful that more and more publishers have embarked upon it.

Some reprint publishers have always issued paperbound books of serious nature, notably New American Library with its Mentor Books, Penguin Books which imports English editions to large extent, and Pocket Books, which, from its start, has issued dictionaries, classics, and manuals, such as the one that heads the following list. Titles in{36} the well-known Modern Library have only recently appeared in paper as well as in cloth, as have the books in the Viking Portable Library. One of the first trade publishers to enter this paperbound field was Doubleday & Company with Anchor Books, a line of paperbound reprints and originals for which Doubleday won the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing in 1955. Knopf’s Vintage Books have gone over the million mark in sales. Doubleday’s Image Books, a paper-back series of Catholic works, when only its first few titles were available, sold over half a million copies in six months.

An example of another type of paperbound publishing is that of Oceana Publications and its Legal Almanac Series. These are original works of several hundred pages, most of them issued in both cloth and paper bindings. This series specializes in one subject, in this case, law in simplified form for the layman. Forty volumes of the Legal Almanac Series have exceeded a million in total sales. The first volume in the series, Marriage and Divorce, has sold over 100,000 copies. There are also numerous other publishers specializing in issuing paperbound books on certain subjects. Many of these books are of the “how-to” and “fix-it-yourself” type, such as those issued by Fawcett Publications, the Lane Publishing Company, Arco Publishing Company and Maco Magazine Corporation.

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BEST SELLER SUBJECTS

Many individuals, groups and organizations are interested in finding out what the best sellers are in certain general categories. I have tried to cover in this section the subjects most frequently asked about. Sales figures for cook books are without doubt those most often sought. Religion perhaps comes next (the individual title most asked about above all other books is the Bible). There is interest in the sales of mystery and detective stories, and, to a less extent, in “westerns” and juveniles. Questions about reference books are usually concerned with their quality. Their standing over the years, implying frequent revisions (although number of editions is not mentioned here unless there has been a change of title) is reflected in sales figures. The same statement is applicable to subscription volumes and sets. “Novelties” are included because of the stir they often make although they are usually short-lived. The reverse is true of poetry. One of the most honored of the creative arts over the centuries, its sales in the short span of time and place covered here, have been comparatively small.

COOKERY

Probably more questions are asked in the field of best sellers about the Bible, next about cook books. All sorts of people and business organizations ask what the best-selling cook books are and how many copies of cook books are published and sold. Most interested are the magazines, especially those designed for the woman at home, and next the producers of radio and TV programs. It is no coincidence that, next to the Bible and books on religious subjects, cook books have sold the best and the most consistently in the non-fiction field since 1895. It is quite apparent from a study of the best seller lists that only the need for advice on feeding the spirit surpasses the need for advice—and books—on feeding the body.

Paradoxically, cook books are seldom seen on the bookstore re{50}ports that appear weekly, monthly, and annually in newspapers and magazines. When a new, especially salable, and well-publicized cook book is brought out or when a new edition of an older, standard cook book is published, it does appear on these lists for a short time. Booksellers are not averse to listing standard books that sell year in and year out on their reports, but such reports, dominated as they would be by the Bible, dictionaries, cook books and other standard books would become monotonous. What periodical would care to publish them?

Figures on the number of new cook books published annually have been compiled by the Publishers’ Weekly only since 1952. Cook books have always been included in the category of domestic science, or, more recently, home economics. This is one of the smallest categories. In 1955 it comprised 255 titles out of 12,589 new books and new editions published in the United States. Though small, it is one of the most important in the book trade and therefore for the general public. It is quite likely that the number of poor cook books in that 255 is infinitesimal in proportion to the number of poor novels in the 2073 issued in 1955.

Nearly every cook book is planned to meet a particular need or some special taste. They vary from the general compendium for the household and from quantity cook books such as those for large institutions to little volumes concerned solely with cooking such specialties as mushrooms or omelettes. There are national and regional cook books, collections of the favorite recipes of well-known persons, books on various techniques such as barbecuing or using an electric mixer, and books for people on every kind of diet. Many of the new cook books and the new editions of standard books have resulted from the many new methods of cookery and the new ways of packaging foods developed during recent years. The number of new books and new editions has remained fairly steady during the past four years: 102 in 1952; 86 in 1953; 77 in 1954; and 91 in 1955.

The leading best seller among cook books, the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book is also one of the top best sellers in all fields. It ranks fourth in the overall list of best sellers during the past sixty years, first{51} in the list of best sellers in hardbound editions only. The top ten on the cookbook best seller list are mostly the standard encyclopedic type that are reissued from time to time in new editions embodying new culinary methods. They range in age from the old standby, familiarly called “Fannie Farmer” or the “Boston Cook Book” to the Good and Easy Cook Book of 1954. A number of the books are sponsored by women’s magazines or by food companies.

Included among cook books are the closely allied diet books. They appear farther down the list, as do also more specialty cook books. Mabel Claire’s Modern Cook Book has been sold throughout the United States through department stores under the name of each particular store, viz. Smith’s Cook Book. Next in age to “Fannie Farmer” among the cook books which have sold over half a million copies is Diet and Health with Key to the Calories. A sensational seller in the 20’s, it appeared on the annual lists of 1922 and 1923, rose to top place in non-fiction in both 1924 and 1925, and appeared for the fifth year on the 1926 list. Look Younger Live Longer was third on the best seller list of 1950, first in 1951. One cook book not listed here because its sales records are no longer available was a wartime best seller of 1917, Better Meals for Less Money.

Other Successful Cook Books

Not inclusive by any means, this list is representative of the variety of successful books in the field. Here are some of the culinary specialties, a teen-age cook book, diet books, and the high-priced, The Gourmet Cookbook, which, at $10, appeals to the audience indicated by its title. Eat and Reduce has also had a large sale in South America; its publisher claims that it has had the largest sale there of any American book in Spanish translation.

DETECTION AND MYSTERY

Almost a condensed version of the overall best seller list is this record of the best sellers in detection and mystery, so close to the top of all best sellers are these books by Mickey Spillane and Erle Stanley Gardner, which of course lead in their own field. This is the biggest list both in number of titles and in total sales of all in the best seller special subjects section. There are 112 books which have sold half a million copies or more on this list, and 56 of them are by Erle Stanley Gardner and/or A. A. Fair, the pen name he uses for his stories which feature the detectives Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Next in numerical representation is Ellery Queen, with 29 titles, including one appearing here under the pen name of Barnaby Ross. But Mickey Spillane leads all the rest in sales of individual titles. He has written only seven books, but they are the top seven on the list.

The original dates of publication are included and the original publishers except when books are out of print in their original editions, in which case the name of the present reprint publisher is given. The dates range from 1908 when Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase (in 1920 turned into a hit play, The Bat, and later into a movie) was first published, up to 1954 and The Glass Village by Ellery Queen.

I have not attempted to draw any distinguishing lines inside the detection and mystery field. Everything is included which would fall into the general classification—detection, spy stories, pursuit stories,{54} psychological mysteries, gangster tales, romantic mysteries, and stories of violent action. The list illustrates well the radical changes that have occurred in public taste in this field, changes which can be considered greater than in any other single subject of creative writing.

Probably the earliest American best seller (outside of Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery tales and their big sales did not occur in his lifetime) was The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green. It was published in 1878 and has sold over half a million copies. Louis Vance, Meredith Nicholson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Roberts Rinehart were authors who appeared regularly on all the annual best seller lists after the turn of the century. In the late ’20’s S. S. Van Dine created Philo Vance, a new type of detective. Through the ’20’s and ’30’s Agatha Christie was considered the favorite of highly literate detective story readers. Many of her books appear on this list of best sellers, among them the one that made her famous, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The Thin Man came along in 1934, introducing a new sort of writing in detective fiction. This story, of swift action and terse phrasing, was the starting point of a new school, the hard-boiled mystery, from which has emerged the sex-and-guts detective of the ’50’s.

In an article in the Saturday Review called A Cosmic View of the Private Eye, John Paterson writes in praise of the hardboiled detective as evolved by Hammett and Chandler, of the change from “the ‘transcendant’ detective of an older, safely established order to one in a bewildering world of disintegrated values.... He is, in the final analysis, the apotheosis of the everyman of good will who, alienated by the values of his time, seeks desperately and mournfully to live without shame, to live without compromise to his integrity.”

In 1946 a select group of readers of The Pleasures of Publishing, a bi-weekly publication of the Columbia University Press, cast their votes for Dorothy Sayers as their favorite detective story writer. In order of choice, following her, were John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson), Erle Stanley Gardner, A. Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Manning Coles and Rex Stout. A Gallup Poll, in 1950, in which 53 per cent of those questioned were college graduates, showed Erle Stanley Gardner as their selection{55} for the best mystery writer of all time.

In the early 1950’s Mickey Spillane’s seven books featuring the ruthless detective Mike Hammer led all others in sales of individual titles. As far as total sales of all his books go, Spillane is not up to Gardner. His sales are about 27,000,000; the sales of all Gardner’s books, including Canadian sales, amount to over 86,000,000 copies. Erle Stanley Gardner must be considered, then, the most popular writer of detective stories in this country, in fact the most popular twentieth century writer of fiction. He is definitely not of the hard-boiled school; he presents a deductive problem usually resolved in a dramatic courtroom scene starring Perry Mason, the lawyer-detective. Perry Mason is not the rough and ready type. In fact he is so gentlemanly that the suggestion has been made that it would be an interesting experiment to send the frustrated Della Street, Mason’s secretary, and the frustrated Archie Goodwin, whose romantic episodes are always being interrupted by his boss, Nero Wolfe, off on a weekend together in Atlantic City.

The first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Velvet Claws, was published in 1933. It was dictated to a stenographer in three and one-half days. Nor has Mr. Gardner let down since. He is a prodigious writer. In 1956 the publication of his fiftieth Perry Mason story was celebrated. In addition he has written over 30 other books including the A. A. Fair mysteries, a series featuring the “D.A.” as detective, and three books of non-fiction—over 80 books in 23 years.

When Mickey Spillane’s fifth thriller, The Big Kill, was published in its paperbound edition, something of a record in print orders was made. The printing consisted of 2,500,000 copies and at the same time new printings of one million copies each of his first four books were made.

Although Spillane is the mystery phenomenon of the 1950’s he must be considered only third in line in popularity of American mystery story writers of all time. Ellery Queen, pseudonym of two men, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, estimates the sale of his works at 35,000,000 plus a foreign sale of from 15 to 20 million. Queen, the son of a New York City police official, is always the hero-detective of{56} the books that bear his name as author. His two originators have published 32 books since their first in 1929, The Roman Hat Mystery. They have also written a number of juvenile mysteries under the name of Ellery Queen, Jr.

Probably next in order of popularity with American detective story readers is the English writer, Agatha Christie. Her detectives, of the deductive school, are principally Hercule Poirot and the quiet little Englishwoman, Miss Marple. Running close to the Christie novels in sales are those by Brett Halliday, featuring the man of action, Mike Shayne, tough-fisted and with an eye for blondes—or brunettes.

Figures for total sales of the output of other popular writers have been estimated mainly from the reports of the paperbound publishers, who are responsible for the big sales in this field: over seven million, Richard S. Prather; over six million, Wade Miller, John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson), and William Ard; over five million, Raymond Chandler, Leslie Charteris, E. Phillips Oppenheim, George Harmon Coxe; over four million, Mary Roberts Rinehart (her total sales, including hardbound books are much greater than this. She has written well over 50 books, but not all of them mysteries.); over three million, Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, F. Van Wyck Mason, Rex Stout and Helen Reilly; over two million, Frances and Richard Lockridge, James Hadley Chase, Bruno Fischer, Leslie Ford, Helen McCloy, Mignon Eberhart, Henry Kane, Edgar Wallace, Bill Ballinger, Sax Rohmer, Ed Lacy, and Peter Cheyney.

Individual detective stories which appeared on the annual best seller lists but not on the overall mystery best seller list, some of their sales figures not available now, are, chronologically, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by A. Conan Doyle (100,569 sold), The House of a Thousand Candles, by Meredith Nicholson (289,944 sold), The Brass Bowl, by Louis J. Vance (184,071 sold), The Port of Missing Men, by Meredith Nicholson (150,429 sold), The Black Bag, by Louis J. Vance (35,247 sold), The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (113,360 sold), The Window at the White Cat, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (152,002 sold), The Pawns Count, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Greene Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine, The Bishop Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine, and The Door, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

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JUVENILES

Statistics on best sellers in the children’s book field are more difficult to assemble accurately and consistently than in any other. The following list of 75 books is an attempt to record the individual titles, published in the United States since 1895, that have sold a quarter of a million copies or more.

There are many of the oldest favorites and classics on the list of early best sellers, those published before 1895. As these books have gone out of copyright they have been issued by various publishers, perhaps newly illustrated or in re-edited or condensed versions. It becomes impossible to collect exact statistics for all these scattered versions, even for some published later than 1895. Many of the original publishers have gone out of existence and even some modern publishers do not have sales records that go back very far. When there have been many publishers and many versions of the same story, it is an all but impossible task to assemble all the sales records, hence the absence of such favorites as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. Modern versions of old favorites are not included in the list unless one specific volume, perhaps with a special illustrator, has accurate sales records,{63} like The Real Mother Goose and Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus. Inexpensive paperbound books in series are not included.

Juvenile fiction has a disconcerting habit of changing its audience. Some of these best sellers like Freckles and Penrod started their careers as adult fiction. Others were launched as juveniles and have since added an adult audience, like the A. A. Milne books. The majority of the books on this list were, however, planned for the youngest group of juvenile readers.

A unique venture in selling to the older age group of children has been the Teen Age Book Club, started over ten years ago. Its books are paperbound, are sold at 25 and 35 cents, and are usually reprints, many of them of adult titles suitable for teen age reading. In the school year 1954-55 the Club sold 2,800,000 paperback books to student members and over 10,000,000 in the past six years. The club’s top sellers in the 1954-1955 period were Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C. Douglas and The Real Story of Lucille Ball by Eleanor Harris.

The top sellers on the following list of best sellers might be said to sell to captive audiences. They are not regular trade books, but are “musts” for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Their very large sales totals, covering yearly distribution, merit places for them here. Additionally the Boy Scouts of America has given me some typical figures for some of their other books. These are for the year 1955; Wolf Cub Scout Books, 970,000; Bear Cub Scout Books, 750,000; Lion Webelos Cub Scout Books, 595,000.

There are huge quantities of children’s books sold which can only be indicated here. The 10-cent to one dollar stores, department stores, and newsstands are the chief outlets for these books which include coloring books, cut-out books, and paper-doll books, for example, as well as versions of the classics and juvenile fiction. One of the big sections of this type of production and sale of children’s books is comprised of “series.” Children latch on to a favorite character and follow him or her through every imaginable adventure in volume after volume. Total estimates of sales for some of these series are available. Not all of these listed just below fall, however, into the class of those just described. The Landmark Books and First Book Series, for example, have{64} their greatest sales through regular bookstore outlets.

Little Golden Books, originated in 1942, have sold 285,000,000 in the United States and Canada.

The Frank Merriwell series, by Burt L. Standish, which flourished in the ’20’s had an estimated sale of 126,000,000.

The 20 Uncle Arthur Bedtime Stories, by Arthur S. Maxwell, begun in 1927, have sold 19,601,979 copies.

The Golden Play Books, 15 cents each, have sold 10,000,000.

Miss Frances’ Ding Dong School Books have sold over 10,000,000 since 1953. Their publicity is tied in with Miss Frances’ TV program for children, and they sell at 25 cents each.

The Burgess Animal Books, by Thornton Burgess, have sold well over 8,000,000 copies.

With over 4,000,000 sales are the Bedtime Story Book series by Thornton Burgess and the Childhood of Famous Americans series.

In the 3,000,000 group are the Landmark Books with over 75 titles, the Golden Nature Guides, the Pollyanna Glad Books, 15 titles, the Twin Books of Lucy Fitch Perkins, 24 of them, and the Raggedy Ann Books, originated by Johnny Gruelle in 1918. The Raggedy Ann Books have also had many by-products in the way of cut-out books, mechanical books, and the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls.

Sixty titles of the First Book Series, edited by Helen Hoke Watts, have sold 2,265,903 copies.

The famous Elsie Dinsmore books by Martha Finley have sold well over 2,000,000. There are 28 titles, the first published in 1868.

Around the 2,000,000 mark is the Little Colonel series by Annie Fellows Johnston.

Twenty titles in the Petersham Story Book series have sold 1,728,000; Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books, ten of them, have sold 1,250,000; the Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Series has sold 1,268,367, and 11 volumes of the Five Little Peppers series by Margaret Sidney have sold 1,415,978 through one publisher since 1937. The first book in this series was published in 1880, and the total sale is, of course, much greater.

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In the over one million group are the Colby Books; the Real Book Series; the Oz books of L. Frank Baum; the Magic Talking Books, with records on their covers; the Seahorse Fun Books at $1 each; the Teen-Age Library; 21 volumes of the Young Readers Bookshelf; the Buddy Books; and such older stories as the Ruth Fielding, Betty Gordon, and Motor Boys books.

Illustrating the pull of comic books (not magazines) are the Classics Illustrated Series and the Classics Illustrated Junior Series. These two lines were designed to present worth-while educational subjects in the comic book format which children like so much. Well over a million copies of the books in each series have been sold. The publisher of some of the older comic books, predecessors of today’s big sellers, report a total sale of over 30,000,000 of such titles as Bringing Up Father, Mutt and Jeff, Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy.

Books distributed only through the low-price stores are those issued by such firms as the Whitman Publishing Company and the Saalfield Publishing Company. The Saalfield Play Books, mostly coloring and paper-doll books, which sell for 25 cents and under, have a lifetime each of from six months to two years. They are always issued in first printings of at least a quarter of a million. No records of individual books are kept. During the 1955 Davy Crockett craze, Grosset & Dunlap sold about two million copies of three Davy Crockett books, including one million of The Picture Story of Davy Crockett and 600,000 of The Davy Crockett Coloring Book.

NOVELTIES AND GAMES

Periodically, a new fad hits the American public. It may be a dance or a song, a slang phrase or a game. Sometimes such a fad is opportunely made the basis of a book that sells until fickle taste turns elsewhere. Sometimes a new brand of book creates the fad as happened with the Cross Word Puzzle Books, which perhaps should head the list of best sellers in this field, but have been excluded because they constitute a series.

Cross word puzzles had been enjoyed by a select group of fans for some years before 1934 when the then new and untried firm of Simon and Schuster made a collection of the puzzles that had been appearing in the New York World. The book was compiled by Prosper Buranelli, F. Gregory Hartswick and Margaret Petherbridge, and it had the added innovation of a pencil that went along with each book in a slot on the binding. The rest is history. Not only did the books themselves create a host of cross word puzzle fans but cross word puzzles have continued ever since as popular newspaper features. They have developed into “Little Foolers,” diagramless puzzles and Double-Crostics for super experts. Simon and Schuster alone had published 73 of the Cross Word Puzzle Books through 1955 and 35 Double-Crostics. Two million one hundred thousand Cross Word Puzzle Books were sold through 1955, 200,000 of the Double-Crostics books. The editorship of the Cross Word Puzzle Books has been continued by Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, that of the Double-Crostics initiated by Elizabeth S. Kingsley and continued by Doris Nash Wortman.

There are not nearly so many Believe It Or Not books as Cross Word Puzzle Books. This was originally also a newspaper fea{70}ture, conceived and drawn by Robert L. Ripley, who capitalized on the Believe It or Not fad not only in books and newspaper syndication but in shows, exhibits and many other ways. Boners and Ask Me Another, great fads in their day, were also published in successive volumes after the first.

Humor, usually in a ribald vein, is dominant on this list of novelty best sellers. There are many cartoon and joke books on it, and pictorial humor like the Zoo books of Clare Barnes, Jr. The Specialist, monologue by a onetime vaudeville headliner, continues to sell and has been published in ten other countries. Dennis, which started as a newspaper picture feature, has probably only started on its best-selling career, with its first two volumes listed here. Another popular cartoon feature reproduced in a number of paperbound books is Walt Kelly’s Pogo. About 1,600,000 of the Pogo books have been sold, though no individual title has sold enough to win a place among these 19 books that have sold over 275,000 copies.

There are eight manuals of games making up the second list of more serious game books, half of them bridge books. Bridge has always been a best-selling subject from the time of Milton C. Work and auction bridge even before the ’20’s. Robert F. Foster’s auction and contract bridge books sold over 1,000,000 copies. The late ’20’s and ’30’s when contract bridge replaced auction was the Culbertson heyday. In the ’40’s and ’50’s bridge instruction books increased in number and continued to sell well. Outstanding in the ’50’s are those by Charles Goren, who estimates the sales of his seven titles at over two million. Canasta book sales hit their high in 1949. The publisher of Invitation to Chess, by Irving Chernev and Kenneth Harkness, believes it to be the best-selling book on chess with 74,058 copies sold.

Novelty Books

Game Books

PAMPHLETS

A very special branch of all book sales consists of pamphlets. They are probably the least publicized and the least important to the retail bookseller of all printed matter. Yet their volume of production and sales is very large. The latest available statistics are those issued in 1949 by the Bureau of Census. The figures are for the year 1947. In that year 402,290,000 pamphlets were sold with a value of $20,656,000. The comparable figures for books were 487,216,000 sold with a value of $435,124,000. In that year there were 9,182 new books and new editions of books published. No complete record of individual pamphlet titles has been kept, but it seems likely from the census figures that there are more new pamphlets than new books produced each year. The great mass of pamphlets issued is probably attributable to the Government Printing Office, to State printing offices, and to universities.

A pamphlet is customarily defined as paperbound printed matter of 64 pages or less. Usually the subject is very specialized. Pamphleteering usually means printing or writing material to be printed in support of a cause or to denounce a wrong. This type of pamphlet publishing makes up a very small part of twentieth century output, although it does exist.

Typical twentieth century pamphleteering is informative rather than crusading in purpose. Among popular pamphlets of this sort are the Town Hall Meeting and Chicago Round Table discussions on the air of current topics, which are regularly printed and distributed. An original series is Public Affairs Pamphlets issued by the Public Affairs Committee, a nonprofitmaking organization which, in its own words, has “revived and modernized pamphleteering as a primary method of conveying important knowledge to a wide and diversified audience.” In its nineteen years of existence this organization has sold over 22 million pamphlets at 25 cents each. Its pamphlets are often co-sponsored{73} and distributed through other national organizations such as the American Red Cross. Many are used in large corporations’ employee reading racks. Some are sold on newsstands.

Public Affairs Committee’s own best sellers are What About Girls, 1,188,306; Races of Mankind, 966,997; Blood’s Magic for All, 747,471; Facing the Facts About Cancer, 683,953; Epilepsy, The Ghost Is Out of the Closet, 604,800; and Building Your Marriage, 522,031.

The Government Printing Office is probably the leading producer of printed matter in the United States. Established by Congress in 1895, the year the first best seller lists were made, it presently sells about 47,000,000 items each year and distributes some 78,000,000 without charge, principally to libraries. Profits, which have amounted to more than $1,500,000 annually since 1950, are turned over to the Treasury Department. All the material is authored by government departments and agencies.

The Superintendent of Documents has supplied the titles and sales figures of some representative best sellers issued by the Government Printing Office, from which the following titles have been selected. They range in price from five cents to $1.50: Infant Care (Children’s Bureau), 10,012,934; Prenatal Care (Children’s Bureau), 4,959,321; The Child from One to Six (Children’s Bureau), 3,893,329; Your Federal Income Tax, 1,838,516; Your Child from Six to Twelve (Children’s Bureau), 1,415,432; First Aid (Bureau of Mines), 771,410; Modern Miracle Men (Senate Document), 685,982; Aircraft Powerplant Handbook (C.A.A.), 562,279; Pilots Weather Handbook, 520,194; What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (Federal Civil Defense publication), 480,246. Other varied subjects are Lee Mansion, 181,511; Window Curtains, 69,722; Pointers on Making Good Lawns, 207,845; Making Cellars Dry, 153,367; Prospecting for Uranium, 330,795.

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POETRY AND DRAMA

Poetry is the stepchild of the best sellers. Individual books of poems seldom appear on the annual best seller lists. In the list following, John Brown’s Body, The White Cliffs (second on the 1941 list), and I’m a Stranger Here Myself, are among the eleven books of poetry that have made the annual lists during sixty years. The two Pocket Books were sold through the outlets for paperbound books, sales of which are never reflected in the bookstore best seller lists.

The other books which have appeared on the annual best seller lists in the course of sixty years, and for only some of which sales figures are obtainable, are chronologically, Poems of Alan Seeger, 1917; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, by Robert W. Service, which headed both the 1917 and 1918 lists; Over Here, by Edgar Guest, 1918; Treasury of War Poetry, by G. H. Clark, 1918 (67,860 sold); In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae, 1919 (17,000 sold); The Years Between, by Rudyard Kipling, 1919 (35,805 sold); The Light of Faith, by Edgar Guest, 1926 and; Fatal Interview, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1931 (64,450 sold). It is obvious from these annual and overall lists that it is war poetry which has had the popular bookstore sale.

Estimates of the total sales of all the works of modern poets put Edgar Guest and Robert W. Service in the lead. There have been, however, substantial bookstore sales of individual titles and collected works of poets not previously mentioned, among them, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T. S. Eliot, and Carl Sandburg. Poetry anthologies are also standard volumes sales-wise in the stores, such as those edited by Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams.

Drama

Plays in book form have a small but devoted audience. In sixty years only three books of plays have appeared on the annual best seller lists, none on the overall lists. The three books are Three Plays by Eugène Brieux, in 1912, Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw in 1924, and Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill, a best seller of 1928, which sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies. More recently, in 1950, The Lady’s Not for Burning by Christopher Fry has appeared on bookstore lists, although its sales were not large enough to place it on any list of the year. New American Library has announced that its sales, in paperbound editions, make Tennessee Williams the leading modern playwright in terms of book sales. About 750,000 copies of his plays have been sold in the 25-cent editions. A recent development in the selling of plays in book form is the Fireside Theatre. This is a book club started in 1949, which selects plays in book form for its membership. In the past few years its average circulation of individual plays has been 11,000 copies. Most popular of its selections have been Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick, Bell, Book and Candle by John Van Druten, Wonderful Town by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial by Herman Wouk. All through this book are a great many books from which plays and motion pictures have been made.

REFERENCE

Reference books, strictly speaking, are the dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases which comprise the first list in this section. They are{76} chiefly concerned with words and language usage or are compendia of facts.

There are almost as many editions of dictionaries as there are of the Bible. In many cases it is impossible to collect sales statistics for specific volumes. Unfortunately this situation results in some notable omissions from this list. The G. & C. Merriam Company, one of the oldest dictionary publishers, established in 1831, was the first publisher of the Webster dictionary after Noah Webster himself. This first Merriam-Webster dictionary was issued in 1847, and has gone through many revisions. The principal twentieth-century editions are the Webster’s New International Dictionary and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The publisher will not release sales figures, but it is evident that they run into many millions. The only figures that have been available are scanty, but they give an inkling of the rest. This is the four and one-half million copy sale of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary between 1936 and 1949 when the sixth edition was issued.

Other large publishers of dictionaries have given some general figures about their sales. The World Publishing Company, with eight separate dictionaries, has averaged a total of about 1,800,000 copies a year for the past five years. All the Funk & Wagnalls dictionaries have sold well over the half-million mark.

One of the best-known American reference works is Robert’s Rules of Order. First published in 1876, it has sold close to a million and one-half copies. Another important reference work originally published in the nineteenth century is Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. In the years 1937-1955 during which it has been a Little, Brown & Company publication, that firm has sold 807,632 copies.

Technical Reference Works

Lines of demarcation in the field of technical reference works are not well defined. In some cases it is a matter of opinion whether a technical book is a reference work or a textbook; it may be both. Probably the only large area of book sales not covered, for many reasons, in the present book is that of textbooks. Soaring enrollments in elementary and high schools and in colleges and estimates of future school population at an even greater increase than that of the past decade make textbooks among the books most in demand and most necessary for the future. There are not many textbooks that have, so far, sold in the millions. Though they are often revised they also frequently become out of date comparatively soon after publication. One of the problems of defining textbook sales has been expressed by a college textbook publisher who writes, “ ... it is not possible for a publisher to know how many copies of one of his best sellers have actually been sold. Since 1942 we have sold about 100,000 copies of a literature anthology—but at least five times as many sales of this title have been made through the second-hand facilities on college campuses all over the country.... Although not every college student sells every one of his textbooks, the overwhelming majority sell the overwhelming majority of the books that they buy new and as many of the second-hand volumes as they can dispose of. For these reasons there is often little relationship between the number of books that a college publisher sells of a given title in a given year and the total number of copies of this same title that are sold during that year.”

Fields of textbook publishing, vary as well as their sales. For example, a very different type from the regular elementary or college{79} textbooks are the publications of Berlitz Publications, Inc., known internationally for its book and record language teaching methods. Charles F. Berlitz calls attention to three of the basic Berlitz books, the Libro Español, the Premier Livre and the English First Book. Since 1880 they have sold, respectively, about 4,200,000, 6,100,000, and 5,300,000 copies. One of the oldest American textbook lines, in the elementary field, is the McGuffey Readers, remembered, often fondly, by those who were school children in the late nineteenth, early twentieth, centuries. The first McGuffey Reader was published in 1836. The sales of all have been estimated at over 122,000,000. Even older was the “blue-black speller,” Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book, sales of which have been estimated at over 60 million.

The following list has been confined to technical reference works, some of which may be used as textbooks, but most of which are mainly purchased for use outside regular educational courses—by craftsmen, technicians, amateur or would-be technicians, homeowners, and others. Mention may be made here of the large sales of a series of year books in a specialized technical field. The Spectator has published nearly 90 yearly editions of the Life Index and Fire Index, giving annual insurance statistics. In the aggregate, 3,600,000 of the Life Index have been sold, and 1,900,000 of the Fire Index.

Manuals and Guides

Here is an assortment of manuals for the use of individuals in specific fields and for students working for specific goals. Most of them are published annually. The date of the first year’s publication is given. At the top should be the American Red Cross First Aid Text Book, best seller of World War II. Its complete sales record is not now avail{81}able, but it can be estimated at about 20,000,000. A World War I best seller from the 1917 list is The Plattsburg Manual.

Reference Works for the Home

These books differ from the reference works listed previously in that they are primarily intended for guidance in domestic affairs. Cook books, which are generically in this group, are treated under their separate heading. The bulk of the sales in the very large figure for The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care are those of the paperbound edition, entitled Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care. The Vest Pocket Calorie Counter is an inexpensive little book for practical use by people who wish to lose or to gain weight. All the other books have appeared only in regular size, hardbound editions.

RELIGION

Any discussion of best sellers in the field of religion must start with the Bible, which is listed in this book only among best sellers first published in the United States before 1895. Unquestionably it is the best seller of all time in this country, most certainly the best seller in the mid-twentieth century. A new version of the Bible, first issued in 1952, has outsold everything else on the best seller lists of the ’50’s. This Revised Standard Version topped the year’s list in 1952, 1953, and 1954, and sold over four million copies in a little more than three years. This, however, is only one Bible. Beginning with John Eliot’s translation of the New Testament into the language of the Massachu{83}setts Indians in 1661, the Bible has been issued by very many different publishers, in different editions and translations, and in parts.

How to find the sales figures for all these volumes through the years? Shall the complete Bible only be estimated or shall its various portions, published separately, be included in its overall sale? Such questions are academic since the exact measurement of Bible sales even for the past sixty years is an impractical task. Its continuing widespread sales in its variety of editions, and the sales figures that are available prove its predominance as the best seller in this country.

My own estimate of average yearly sales of the complete Bible in the United States is in the neighborhood of seven million copies.

In 1956 there were editions of the complete Bible available from fourteen different regular Bible publishers, including Catholic, Jewish, Episcopal, and Protestant versions. Some of these publishers had more than one edition of the Bible; most of them had, in addition, portions of the Bible bound separately, commentaries, concordances, Bible dictionaries and atlases, Bible helps and lesson books, prayer books, hymnals and missals. Beyond these there are certain other versions of the Bible which are produced occasionally by the trade publishers, those who are not ordinarily considered Bible publishers. They swell the total although the sales of their Bibles are small in comparison with sales of the standard versions such as the King James. Examples of volumes of this type are The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature, which has sold 194,929 copies since 1936, The Dartmouth Bible, which has sold 31,000 copies since its publication in 1950, and The Runner’s Bible, which has had a sale of 158,000 since 1915.

My seven-million estimate of Bible sales is based upon figures submitted by some of the regular Bible publishers (not all are willing to give them), aided by estimates made by two experienced men in the field of Bible publishing. One is David H. Scott, Manager of the Bible department of Harper & Brothers, who estimates the total number of King James Bibles sold through commercial channels at about five million copies a year. The other is Ben D. Zevin, President of the World Publishing Company, who puts the figures at seven million. Mr. Zevin gives an approximate figure of fifty million for the number of{84} Bibles sold by his company in its fifty years of publishing. Most Bible publishers do not know and only a few are willing to hazard an estimate of the number of Bibles sold in their firms’ existence.

In addition to the Bibles sold commercially in the United States, many are given away or sold at cost by such organizations as The Gideons and the American Bible Society, which is “primarily a missionary organization interested in the distribution of the Holy Scriptures as widely as possible.” In the years from 1809 through 1954 it has distributed over thirty-eight million complete Bibles in the United States. The majority have been sold at or slightly below cost; in some cases they have been given as free grants. The Society also provides New Testaments and Bibles regularly to members of the armed forces, without charge. The government, during World War II, for the first time in American military history, issued a Bible to every man and woman who entered the Armed Services, A King James or Douay New Testament was given to those of Protestant or Catholic faith and a condensation of the Old Testament to those of Jewish faith, 17,000,000 volumes in all.

Sales of books on religious subjects for general reading can be definitely determined, at least for those published since 1895. The following list of twenty-four best sellers in this category includes books that have sold half a million copies or more. They have been written from the point of view of many different religions; they range in publication date from 1896 to 1952. More of these titles have appeared on the annual best seller lists than the titles in any of the other subject lists. 1953 was the biggest year of all for religious books on the annual best seller lists, with six out of the first ten in non-fiction. Peace of Mind appeared on three consecutive lists, 1946-1948, A Man Called Peter in 1952, 1953 and 1955, and The Power of Positive Thinking was sixth in 1952, second only to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in 1953, 1954 and 1955.

Other Successful Religious Books

Here are some more very successful sellers in the religious book field, added because of the great surge of public interest in books on religious subjects, both non-fiction and fiction, during the past decade. Most of these titles were first published in that period: The Greatest Faith Ever Known, by Fulton Oursler (sales 369,970 copies); This I Believe, Series 1 (281,014); On Being a Real Person, by Harry Emerson Fosdick (230,000); Life Is Worth Living, Series 1, by Fulton J. Sheen (223,500); Peace of Soul, by Fulton J. Sheen (223,000); Power Through Constructive Thinking, by Emmet Fox (206,000); Christ and the Fine Arts, by Pearl Maus (200,000); The Life of Christ, by Giovanni Papini (200,000); The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (194,929); The Return to Religion, by Henry C. Link (181,739); The Prayers of Peter Marshall (140,500); The Secret of Happiness, by Billy Graham (137,282); This I Believe, Series 2 (129,034); Religions in America (102,570).

Religious Novels

Twenty religious novels have sold over half a million copies since 1895. A book has been considered a religious novel if it has a dominantly religious theme or if its central character is closely related to religion—a minister or priest, or a Biblical character. There are perhaps many other novels which have religious overtones. I have tried, however, to confine this list to books in which the religious theme is predominant, essential to the plot. It is interesting, in sharp contrast to religious non-fiction, that only half of the books in the following list have been published since 1940.

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There are a number of other religious novels which were best sellers in their year of publication: A Singular Life, by Mrs. Ward and The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic, 1896; The Christian, by Hall Caine, 1897; The Inside of the Cup, by Winston Churchill, 1913; The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land, by Ralph Connor, 1919; Simon Called Peter, by Robert Keable and Maria Chapdelaine, by Louis Hemon, 1922; Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis, 1927; Joseph and His Brethren, by H. W. Freeman, 1929; Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather, 1931; Three Loves, by A. J. Cronin, 1932; Forgive Us Our Trespasses, by Lloyd G. Douglas, 1933; The Nazarene, by Sholem Asch, 1939; Mary, by Sholem Asch, 1949; The Foundling, by Cardinal Spellman, 1951; and Moses, by Sholem Asch, 1951.

SUBSCRIPTION BOOKS

Subscription books differ from all the other books listed in this volume in the method by which they are sold. They are not sold in bookstores, except occasionally in secondhand bookstores, but are sold by house-to-house canvassing, by mail order or advertising in periodicals, and over the air. They are usually sets of books, consisting of many volumes. The “book agent” used to sell sets of well-established authors like Shakespeare, Dickens and Thackeray. Nowadays subscription books are usually encyclopedias, for both children and adults. Methods of selling have changed from the old horse-and-buggy days, although even now some of the subscription book houses have hundreds of salesmen in the field.

Subscription selling, which usually implies installment selling, has flourished in this country ever since the days of Parson Weems. For the purpose of this book no attempt has been made to go that far back into the past. Twenty-one present-day subscription and mail order houses were queried as to their sales. Those who gave factual replies are listed here with their responses as to their sales and sales figures.

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WESTERNS

This list of western stories which have sold over half a million copies is short but it represents a rapidly growing and consistently selling field. Western stories sell increasingly well, especially in their 25-cent paperbound editions. One of the books on this list, Rawhide Range, is a paperbound “original.” Western stories are far from reaching the big totals of the detective stories—for one reason few women read western stories. But there are probably just as many if not more women mystery fans than men. Like the Mystery Writers of America, the western story writers have formed their own organization, Western Writers of America, and publish a professional magazine, The Roundup, similar to MWA’s The Third Degree. Science fiction is another type of writing growing in popularity, but as yet there are not enough big sales of individual titles to warrant its inclusion as a section of this book. These three fields, mysteries, westerns, and science fiction, often overlap; it is occasionally difficult to classify a story definitely in one of the three.

Zane Grey is the author of five of the thirteen top-selling westerns listed below, and he is undoubtedly the best-selling western author of the past sixty years, with his overall total of nearly 28,000,000. The Virginian, by Owen Wister, oldest of the thirteen, is second on the list. The fiftieth anniversary of its publication was celebrated in 1952. It has been a stage play and there have been four movie versions. The book has added to American expressions the hero’s famous line, “When you call me that, smile!” The Virginian is the only book on the list, besides the Zane Grey titles, which has appeared on annual best seller lists. Nine out of these thirteen books were published before 1943.

Although not many western authors have piled up big sales with individual titles, they are prolific, usually producing at least two or three new stories per year. Some of the writers of westerns whose total sales are high are: William MacLeod Raine, over 19,000,000; Ernest Haycox, over 13,000,000; Todhunter Ballard, over 5,000,000; Clarence E. Mulford, William Colt MacDonald, Peter Field, and Clar{91}ence Budington Kelland, over 4,00,000; Norman Fox, Wayne Overholser, and Luke Short, over 2,000,000; Evan Evans and Al Cody, over 1,000,000.

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BEST SELLERS
BY YEARS

1895-1955

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1895

The year in which the first American best seller lists were published was in the era of bicycles (which were to stage a return nearly fifty years later during the gas rationing days of World War II) and the Gibson girl, with her pompadour hair-do. Rural free delivery was established in that year, an event that was to have a notable effect upon merchandising of every kind, including the marketing of books. Romantic novels like The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope and Richard Harding Davis’ Princess Aline, which was illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, suited the mood of the period, though the homely Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush of Ian Maclaren and the exotic Trilby were the top best sellers. Best remembered of the first ten are these two, both of them tremendously successful in play form. Only two of the books on this first list were written by American authors. The other eight titles, by British and European authors, would have been unprotected by copyright in this country five years earlier, and several publishers or printers could have issued them without any legal arrangement with the rightful publishers. The passage of the international copyright law in 1891 resulted in orderly publication—a fact which helped to make possible the compiling of best seller lists.

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1896

Gold was discovered in the Klondike. Bryan ran for President. Books on bimetallism and the gold standard were the most widely-read non-fiction. The best-known of them, Coin’s Financial School, enjoyed a revival. In Boston the Aeronautical Annual was, strangely enough, a best seller. 1896 was the year in which the first movies were shown—introducing a new medium of entertainment that was to have noticeable effect upon the business of publishing. The popularity of the historical novel, America’s favorite reading all through the 1890’s and the early 20th century and revived again and again, was marked by the sales of such books as A Lady of Quality and The Seats of the Mighty. Tom Grogan, heading the 1896 list, marks the first appearance of that long-time favorite, F. Hopkinson Smith. The success of A Singular Life and The Damnation of Theron Ware illustrates the continuance of interest in religious novels from the previous decade, when Robert Elsmere, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, and John Ward, Preacher, by Margaret Deland, were high favorites. The list shows an increase in the number of books by American authors. Books by six of these authors—F. Hopkinson Smith, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gilbert Parker, Harold Frederic, John Kendrick Bangs, and Stephen Crane—are still in demand by collectors of American first editions.

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1897

Although the “400” ruled New York society and decreed the conventions of the nation, the great novel of the day was that famous story of the early Christians, Quo Vadis. This year marked the appearance of Little, Brown & Company as a publisher of best sellers. James McIntyre of that firm showed genius in reaching large markets, especially difficult at that period with a book with a Latin title, the author of which had a long Polish name. The semi-religious novels of Hall Caine were coming into prominence too. This year also saw the first appearance among best sellers of Paul Leicester Ford, whose books, together with those of Winston Churchill (the American novelist), Charles Major, Mary Johnston, and others, were the record makers of their day in the field of historical fiction. The Honorable Peter Stirling had an interesting publishing history. Its publisher, Henry Holt & Company, was chiefly known for scholarly volumes and textbooks, although in 1895 it had taken a successful fling in trade publishing with The Prisoner of Zenda. Peter Stirling, issued in a small first printing, did not reach large sales until one San Francisco bookseller announced that the chief character was modeled upon President Cleveland. Word-of-mouth advertising brought the sales of the book eventually to 228,000 copies.

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1898

“Remember the Maine!” swept the nation following the battleship’s destruction by an explosion in Havana Harbor, which brought the United States into war with Spain on April 25. The Spanish fleet was destroyed in Manila Bay on May 1. The Philippines (temporarily captured by the Japanese forty-four years later) were annexed, and the peace treaty was signed on December 10. “The end of the war came at an opportune time for autumn business,” says a book trade letter of the period. Several authors were included on the best seller list for the first time—Rudyard Kipling, whose books created a furor, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and S. Weir Mitchell. The sale of Mitchell’s Hugh Wynne was not handicapped by the book’s being published in two volumes, nor was that Helbeck of Bannisdale, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, also a two-volume novel. Though Mark Twain was writing at this period, his books never appeared on bookstore best seller lists, for most of them were issued by subscription companies whose house-to-house sales were not recorded in best seller reports from bookstores.

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1899

An International Peace Conference sponsored by the Russian government met at The Hague. Aguinaldo staged an insurrection in the Philippines. The Boer War began. The great novel of the day, David Harum, a novel that became a stage hit and many years later a movie with Will Rogers in the title role, was the story of a down-to-earth countryman of upper New York State. When Knighthood Was in Flower was the first best-selling novel to bear the Indianapolis imprint of the Bowen-Merrill Company, later the Bobbs-Merrill Company, a firm which developed a technique of exploiting popular fiction that greatly influenced American publishing. When Knighthood Was in Flower, Janice Meredith, and Richard Carvel are perhaps the best-remembered of the novels of this great era of historical fiction. Richard Carvel introduced Winston Churchill to the best seller lists, an American author who was to attain leading places on many later annual lists and whose name was much better known then in America than that of Winston Spencer Churchill of England. Also on the 1899 list appeared Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne’s humorous character who was quoted for many years.

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1900

1900 was the year of the Boxer Rebellion in China, the great hurricane and flood in Galveston, Texas, and the first excavation for the New York subway. The new century began with historical novels dominating the nation’s reading: To Have and to Hold, Janice Meredith, Alice of Old Vincennes, and others. David Harum had a follower in the field of rural wisdom in Eben Holden, which for a short time brought D. Lothrop & Co. (of Five Little Peppers fame) into the field of adult publishing. Bowen-Merrill was prominent on the list with three titles, two of them by Hoosier novelists Charles Major and Maurice Thompson.

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1901

President McKinley was shot while attending the Pan-American Exposition, and Theodore Roosevelt took office on September 14. Though this was a year of financial panic, famous novels sold in the hundreds of thousands. The first book of a previously unknown author, The Helmet of Navarre, made such a success as a serial in The Century that it was published in an unprecedented first printing of 100,000 copies. Turning from the Revolutionary setting of Richard Carvel to the Civil War scene for his new book, Winston Churchill established The Crisis as the best seller of the year. Alice of Old Vincennes climbed from tenth place on the best seller list of the previous year to second place, via national advertising and promotion such as books had seldom before been given. Graustark, with the Chicago imprint of Stone & Kimball, established a lasting reputation for George Barr McCutcheon, another of the Hoosier school of writers. Together with Harold MacGrath’s The Puppet Crown, it marked a new trend in fiction—toward the light romance of intrigue and adventure in high society.

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1902

While “ragtime” swept America, Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande was a popular success in Paris. The first “skyscrapers” were being built. the best seller list. Advance orders for Mary Johnston’s Audrey exceeded 100,000 copies. Several new writing reputations were established by 1902 sales—those of Owen Wister, Emerson Hough, and Alice Caldwell Hegan (later Mrs. Rice). The book, the play, in which Dustin Farnum acted for ten years, and the movie in which Gary Cooper portrayed “The Virginian” have made the hero’s famous words “When you call me that, smile,” familiar in many an American household. Eventually The Virginian was to sell well over a million and a half copies. Owen Wister dedicated it to his lifelong friend, Theodore Roosevelt. The Hoosier school added Booth Tarkington to its best-selling membership with his third book, The Two Vanrevels. His first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana, had been published in 1899. On this list too a detective story appeared for the first time. It was The Hound of the Baskervilles, by that most famous writer of detective fiction, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

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1903

1903 was the year of the first successful airplane flight, made by the Wright brothers on December 17. The past few years had been a period of financial crisis; now the era of great industrial expansion was beginning. Big business and high finance were introduced as themes for the best seller by Frank Norris, The Pit. With Lovey Mary, Alice Hegan Rice repeated the success of her Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Both were in the Century Company’s famous series of short dollar novels, a series which reached its sales climax with The Lady of the Decoration in 1907. A new author, John Fox, Jr., appeared with the first of two novels that were to become almost synonymous with the words “best seller.” There was only one English author on the list, Mrs. Humphry Ward; but her Lady Rose’s Daughter was in number one position. For the first time, a non-fiction title appears, autobiography by the famous Saturday Evening Post editor. Up to 1912 no distinction was made on the lists between fiction and non-fiction.

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1904

The Russo-Japanese War was raging, and Americans were, on the whole, sympathetic to Japan. Advertisements of the year offered new rolls for phonographs, automobile road maps, one-piece collar buttons, and Sapolio. The World’s Fair was on in St. Louis, the New York subway was opened, the Panama Canal was begun, and the first successful tunnel under the Hudson River was finished. In the magazines and newspapers the “literature of exposure” was appearing. Lincoln Steffens was writing; Thomas W. Lawson produced Friday the Thirteenth; and Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company was running in McClure’s Magazine. Among books, historical and romantic fiction dominated the best seller lists and the “sex problem” reared its head. Again Winston Churchill topped all other novelists of the year. An edition of 110,000 copies of Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance was published; like most of these early 20th-century novels, it was priced at $1.50.

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1905

Novels were beginning to utilize motor cars and wireless telegraphy, the new inventions of the period, in their plots. “Realism” appeared in literature. Novels and plays on business themes were popular. One of the stage hits based on a business theme was Charles Klein’s The Lion and the Mouse. Maxine Elliott and Mrs. Fiske were stars of the period. The first issue of Variety was published on December 16. The Clansman, Thomas Dixon’s novel of the Ku Klux Klan, which was to become, as The Birth of a Nation, one of the most famous feature pictures of the silent movies, was well up on this year’s best seller list. The Williamsons made the list with one of their first automobile romances. They specialized in the type of story in which the heroine falls in love with her chauffeur, who is actually the scion of a titled British family. “Motormania” hit the nation in a big way and practically all the publicity pictures of authors showed them at the wheels of their 1905 automobiles.

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1906

One of the most influential novels ever published in this country, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, awoke the American public to the menace of the “meat trust” and resulted in the passage of the Pure Foods and Drugs Act. Theodore Roosevelt, who took the “big stick” to some of the big corporations, championed simplified spelling as well as trust busting. John Philip Sousa was the March King of the nation. William Vaughan Moody’s The Great Divide was a Broadway success. William Randolph Hearst was defeated for the governorship of New York State. Here for the first time was an all-American best seller list, which Winston Churchill headed for the third time, with another novel which, like The Crisis and The Crossing made good use of the letter C. Robert W. Chambers’ The Fighting Chance was published in a first printing of 50,000 copies, in six weeks went to 100,000 and soon to 200,000. One of the first hits in the mystery-adventure field which was not a costume romance was Meredith Nicholson’s House of a Thousand Candles.

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1907

1907 was a year of financial panic. Harrison Fisher was the popular artist of the time, along with Howard Chandler Christy, who illustrated Beverly of Graustark, and James Montgomery Flagg. The Harrison Fisher “gift book” annual was called A Dream of Fair Women, each colored illustration inspired by a popular poem. 1907 was the year in which Ian Maclaren died; he was the great popular novelist of the previous decade and author of the first best seller of these yearly lists, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush. Novelist Stewart Edward White was photographed in his two-cylinder Maxwell runabout; Mrs. Pat Campbell arrived to tour the country; Farrar and Chaliapin were singing at the Metropolitan, and Mary Garden at the Manhattan Opera House; the Lusitania made its first voyage to New York; and The Man from Home, by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, was the theatrical hit of the year. The Century Company’s short dollar fiction series, which had started with the publication of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, reached another high with The Lady of the Decoration. Robert W. Chambers’ new novel, The Younger Set, marking the interest in sophisticated society romance, had sales of{108} 200,000 copies, equaling the sale of his The Fighting Chance in 1906. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis publishers, had four titles on the list, to the envy of many an eastern publisher.

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1908

Belgium annexed the Congo. Maude Adams was playing in Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, and Augustus Thomas’ The Witching Hour was another theatrical success. The Harrison Fisher annual was Bachelor Belles. Winston Churchill was again first on the best seller list, having deserted his southern historical scenes for a New Hampshire setting. The first printing of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, third on the list, was sold out in a few months. One of the best-known popular songs used the book’s title—a songwriting habit that has persisted. Frances Hodgson Burnett was still a best seller twenty-two years after her greatest hit, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Nine of the authors were Americans, but all were “repeaters” from previous years, a characteristic of the fiction lists, which report favorite writers year after year.

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1909

William Howard Taft was inaugurated as President of the United States; the first “Model T” Ford rolled off the assembly line; Peary reached the North Pole; and suffragettes were chaining themselves to London railings in this year 1909. Rube Goldberg’s Foolish Questions was a regular feature of the New York Evening Mail, Frances Starr was appearing in The Easiest Way, and Mary Garden triumphed as Salome. “The art of the moving picture is still in its infancy,” wrote Frederic Taber Cooper. Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf made its first appearance. In the publication of Basil King’s The Inner Shrine, best-selling book of 1909, Harper used anonymity to build up curiosity. The same publisher had also employed that method in selling Katherine Cecil Thurston’s hit book of 1904 and 1905, The Masquerader, and was to use it again in 1910 with Basil King’s The Wild Olive. This promotion stunt can be used only infrequently or its effect is blunted. Another example of its success, twenty years later, was the publication of Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife in 1929 by Cape & Smith. The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, was the first American detective story to make the annual best seller list. It was illustrated in color by Howard Chandler Christy. William J. Locke, who{111} had long been popular and is best remembered for his Beloved Vagabond, was introduced to the list, in tenth place, with one of his typically whimsical tales.

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1910

The end of an era had come with the death of Edward VII of England. 1910 was also the year of the death, in her ninety-second year, of Julia Ward Howe, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Japan annexed Korea. The Mauretania was queen of the Atlantic. Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler was produced in Paris; and Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, in London. Montague Glass’ Potash and Perlmutter stories were running in the Saturday Evening Post, and the newspaper “funnies” of the day were The Hall Room Boys and Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff. Everyone was humming Ethelbert Nevin’s song, “The Rosary,” which was used in the plot of the year’s best-selling novel—the first to take precedence over a new Churchill novel at the top of the list in a number of years. So popular and profitable was the book that its publisher’s new building on West 45th Street, in New York, was dubbed “The Rosary.” But its author, Florence Barclay, along with such other authors as the Williamsons and Eleanor Abbott, is almost forgotten today. On the other hand, Mary Roberts Rinehart, represented by two books on the 1910 list, is still a best seller.

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1911

Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was the song of the year. It swept the country in 1911, and staged a return some twenty-seven years later. As a result of the 1938 movie of that title, an additional 1,000,000 copies of the song were sold. Along with ragtime came the first big wave of mechanized music—the player piano and the phonograph, forerunners of radio, talking screen and TV. The New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, which, with other libraries, is a final repository for many of the forgotten best sellers of yesterday, was opened on May 23. Top seller of the year, The Broad Highway, by the new English writer, Jeffery Farnol, marked the last high spot of this long era of the historical novel. A total of 305,000 copies were sold in both original and reprint editions. Here was the first appearance of Harold Bell Wright, who built an extraordinary following, perhaps largely among a public not generally buyers of books. Gene Stratton Porter, many of whose books are among the big American best sellers of all time, made her first appearance on these lists with The Harvester. Freckles had been published in 1904 but had missed making an annual list largely because its great sale came after it had gone into a 50-cent reprint edition.{114} The Winning of Barbara Worth was priced at $1.30 and Queed, a first novel that caught the public fancy, at $1.35—both prices typical of their time.

{115}

1912

Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States, defeating both William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt; the latter’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican party. Arizona{116} and New Mexico were admitted to the Union. The dramatic sinking of the great liner Titanic, with many notables on board and with enormous loss of life, stunned two continents. In this year began the heyday of the Harold Bell Wright-Gene Stratton Porter popularity. Both their 1911 best sellers reappeared on the 1912 list, Mrs. Porter’s reaching top place. Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s Tante gave a note of literary distinction to a none too distinguished group of novels. The Publishers’ Weekly added non-fiction best-selling records this year and again in 1913, then dropped them for three years until the sales of books about World War I made non-fiction titles big sellers again. Previously fiction and non-fiction had been lumped together, with the result that the list consisted entirely of fiction and a book of general literature seldom if ever reached a yearly best seller list. Not until the 1920’s did non-fiction sales equal those of fiction, when such books as H. G. Wells’ Outline of History began to come along. Non-fiction best sellers tell more about the subjects in which the public was interested than which authors were their favorites. The first non-fiction best-seller list featured “self-help” books, biography, travel, social and economic problems, philosophy—recurring topics through all the later years. Notable was the appearance of two books by Arnold Bennett on the list.

{117}

1913

In 1901, 1904, 1906, 1908, and again in 1913 a novel by Winston Churchill headed fiction sales. Hall Caine’s The Woman Thou Gavest Me sold 346,000 in the year. Pollyanna made her first appearance, beginning a series that continued to sell over many years, although latterly as juvenile reading. Non-fiction included (a year before the{118} outbreak of World War I) a book on Germany and President Wilson’s statement of his program. Brieux’ plays appeared for the second year—one of the few books of drama in all these lists. The discussion of one of the plays, Damaged Goods, when performed in New York, on a startling theme for its times, probably accounted for the book’s large sale. Milton Work, first bridge authority to achieve a national sale for his instruction book, was later succeeded by Culbertson and then Goren.

{119}

1914

In midsummer an Austrian archduke was murdered in the obscure Balkan town of Sarajevo, and by fall all Europe was at war. The United States had just opened the Panama Canal to the world’s seaborne traffic. At home, everyone was singing one of Jerome Kern’s first great song hits, “They Didn’t Believe Me,” from The Girl from Utah. Harold Bell Wright attained first place as most popular novelist of the year, closely followed by Eleanor Porter with Pollyanna and Winston Churchill with his story of a liberal minister, which had been the 1913 leader. Among the new names were those of Owen Johnson, already known for his appealing stories of Lawrenceville School, Leona Dalrymple, with Diane of the Green Van under the new Chicago imprint of Reilly & Britton (now Reilly & Lee), and W. B. Maxwell. It is interesting to note that in this year of 1914 two best sellers were adult novels about boys. Once in a long while such a story hits the hearts of its readers—as did J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye many years later. Perhaps the most famous book on this list is that novel of youth, whose hero, Penrod, belongs in the permanent roll of American literature.

{120}

1915

U. S. war industries were booming. The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on May 7. “Hello Frisco” was the song of the day, celebrating the opening of the New York-San Francisco telephone line; the first transatlantic speech was given by radio, and the first telephone message sent across the Atlantic. Poison gas made its appearance on Europe’s battlefields. Billy Sunday was exhorting a good many Americans into repentance. The Birth of a Nation, first great feature film, based upon The Clansman, a best seller of 1905, opened in New York. F. Hopkinson Smith, author of Felix O’Day, a best seller of 1915, whose novels had been best sellers ever since the 1890’s, died in his seventy-seventh year. The Turmoil, a Booth Tarkington major novel, headed the list of fiction. K, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, in fifth place, is her best-known non-mystery novel. Here came the first of the many Zane Grey books to appear on the lists, and another new name was that of Ernest Poole, whose novel of New York harbor has a well-established place in American fiction.

{121}

1916

The First World War was in its third year. The New York-New Jersey area was rocked by the Black Tom explosion, supposedly engineered by German secret agents. Woodrow Wilson was re-elected on the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” and “preparedness” became the watchword of the day. For the second year in succession Booth Tarkington headed the list of best sellers, this time with Seventeen, novel of adolescence, almost as well known as his famous Penrod. Seventeen has sold over half a million copies. In fourth place was Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells, which gave thousands of Americans a better understanding of the war. Here is the first appearance of Kathleen Norris with The Heart of Rachael. Dear Enemy was written by the author of the better-remembered Daddy Long Legs, which, because of its slow steady sale, did not appear on any annual list. Along with such books as Penrod, Seventeen, and the Pollyanna stories, it marks a noticeable trend through this period toward novels about very young people written to entertain adults.

{122}

1917

The United States declared war on Germany on April 6. The first of the A.E.F. landed in France in June. Liberty Loans were launched and Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin drew enormous crowds to buy bonds, as they made appearances in such places as the steps of the New York Public Library. Revolution swept imperial Russia. Jazz was the rage in America. Large hotels and restaurants introduced thés dansants featuring fox trots. As Americans donned khaki and rolled puttees, Mr. Britling rose to top place in fiction, selling 350,000 copies in fifteen months. Irving Bacheller reappeared, after sixteen years, with his Light in the Clearing in second place, followed by many other familiar names—Locke, Porter, Grey, Hichens, etc.—though none of these books is remembered as its author’s best. Although most of the fiction was on the mediocre side, non-fiction and war books (both added classifications in this year) showed what the war-minded American public wanted, for most this “general non-fiction” list reflected the emotions and emergencies of wartime America. First was the poetry of Robert W. Service, then The Plattsburg Manual for future officers. Sir Oliver Lodge aroused great interest when he, a noted scientist, proclaimed his belief in communion with the dead, in this case with his son, who had been killed in the war. Alan Seeger’s poem, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, was responsible for the continued sale of his book through the war years. Over the Top, best-remembered of World War I books, glorified the doughboy and sold 350,000 copies in 1917.

{124}

1918

The Long Long Trail” wound on into the last year of war, which began with a great German offensive and ended with dancing in the streets as the first premature Armistice Day was celebrated. Zane Grey’s U. P. Trail was the most popular novel of the year, firmly establishing his reputation as a writer of western adventure that was to last for more than two decades. The Tree of Heaven introduced an English writer of consequence to the American best seller list. Dere Mable, considered the prototype of soldier humor, flashed into popularity as did See Here, Private Hargrove a quarter of a century later. Edward Streeter’s book, which might well have been classed as a war book instead of fiction, quickly sold half a million copies. Not for thirty-one years did Edward Streeter’s name reappear on the annual lists, with Father of the Bride in 1949, which made almost as big a hit. E. Phillips Oppenheim, whose stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure have been read by at least two generations in England and America, made his first appearance on the list. There are four books of poetry among non-fiction, all with wartime appeal—a type of writing that was noticeably missing among World War II best sellers with one exception. Edgar Guest, through his thirty-five years of writing, has had probably the largest popular audience for poetry since James Whitcomb Riley in the 1890’s. Two important volumes of memoirs received attention in that war year of 1918—Mark Twain’s Letters edited by Albert Bigelow Paine and the Recollections of Viscount Morley. Ambassador Gerard’s book on Germany had a noticeable influence on American public opinion just as William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, Ambassador Davies’ Mission to Moscow, and Ambassador Grew’s Ten Tears in Japan were to have in World War II. One of the most widely discussed books from a literary point of{126} view was Under Fire. Three books by Coningsby Dawson, star reporter of World War I and extremely popular lecturer in the United States, appeared on this list of war books.

{127}

1919

The fight for the League of Nations was on, after the Paris Peace Conference, with Henry Cabot Lodge its most vigorous opponent in the Senate. President Wilson took his dream of world organization to the people in a nation-wide tour. Calvin Coolidge was settling the Boston police strike, an act that was to win him national fame and help to bring him eventually to the White House. The “high cost of living” made the daily headlines. The first airplane crossed the Atlantic, a Navy plane that flew from Nova Scotia to Portugal. The{128} Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an outstanding war novel of more romantic appeal that Mr. Britling of 1916-1917, headed 1919 fiction. Dutton used spectacular display advertising to push it. Its price, $1.90, was a new high for a book destined for wide sales. Later, The Four Horsemen became one of the first movies to build the great popularity of Rudolf Valentino. With The Arrow of Gold, Doubleday, Page succeeded in giving Joseph Conrad the wide audience he deserved. Here is the first appearance of two very popular women novelists, “Elizabeth” (Countess von Arnim), and Temple Bailey, the latter of whom Charles Shoemaker, of the Penn Publishing Company of Philadelphia, brought to the front and made a competitor of such writers as Kathleen Norris for the great audience of romantic women readers. Non-fiction best seller and war book records were merged in 1919. What has become a classic of our literature, The Education of Henry Adams, took top place among non-fiction. Like Alan Seeger’s Poems, John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields became a best seller on the strength of a single poem, the title poem in this case. Kipling’s The Years Between contained some poems about World War I.

{129}

1920

The first election returns broadcast in the United States announced the success of Warren G. Harding’s campaign for the Presidency. Women voted for the first time in the 1920 election and helped to put across the amendment to the Constitution that ushered in the prohibition era, the era in which such books as This Side of Paradise,{130} Flaming Youth, and The Plastic Age brought into the limelight the uninhibited “younger generation.” Zane Grey again topped best-selling fiction with The Man of the Forest. William Randolph Hearst was in the book publishing field for a time; his Cosmopolitan Book Company put two favorites—Peter B. Kyne and James Oliver Curwood, both writers of outdoor adventure stories—on the best seller list. Joseph C. Lincoln, teller of homely New England tales, joined the best sellers with The Portygee. Heading non-fiction was Philip Gibbs, a favorite reporter of World War I, who found a waiting market for a volume of war episodes, Now It Can Be Told. A new publisher, Harcourt, Brace & Company, appeared on the list with a book of historical importance, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John M. Keynes. Public interest in President Theodore Roosevelt’s letters, written with charm and spontaneity, and in the biography of him by William Roscoe Thayer, was highlighted by his recent death. Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas started a new vogue in travel literature and aroused the public’s interest in exotic lands.

{131}

1921

Normalcy” was President Harding’s word for the administration he hoped to provide—but the best-selling novel of the year was a “debunker” of normal small-town life, the book that skyrocketed Sinclair Lewis into fame. Main Street sold 295,000 copies in 1921 and brought a new realistic vein into American popular literature which had, for many years, been dominated by royal romance and western adventure. Lewis’s book was published by the young firm of Harcourt, Brace{132} & Company, which also provided the second novel on the list, The Brimming Cup, by Dorothy Canfield, one of the most beloved writers of a quarter century. Edith Wharton, already a literary notable, appeared on the list for the first time since 1906 with her most famous book, The Age of Innocence. Here, too, was the first appearance of Gertrude Atherton, and of Coningsby Dawson as a writer of fiction. Next to Main Street, the novel that became most famous was The Sheik, by Edith M. Hull, a writer whose name had been familiar on best seller lists for many years but whose 1921 book sold like wildfire and eventually became the movie vehicle which made Rudolf Valentino the screen idol of his day. A landmark among best sellers headed non-fiction—H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, which was issued first as a two-volume set at $10.50, was later marketed in one volume at $5.00, and a few years later had an edition of half a million at $1.00. White Shadows of the South Seas was even more popular in its second year; a second and similar book by Frederick O’Brien also appeared on this list. One of the first “debunking” biographies was The Mirrors of Downing Street, published under a pseudonym. The visit to this country of Margot Asquith, wife of the English Prime Minister, stirred interest in her autobiography, and Wilson’s Secretary of State scored a success with his history of World War peace negotiations. This is almost the last of non-fiction best sellers to deal directly with World War I, only three years after its close. Hylan had just been elected Mayor of New York City; Curran defeated Fiorello La Guardia in the Republican primary; and Emperor Hirohito of Japan went on a world peace tour.

{133}

1922

Bobbed hair—short skirts—low waistlines—mah-jongg—Paul Whiteman at the Palais Royale—and Babbitt, which introduced a new descriptive word into our language, are all reminders of 1922.{134} That was the year, too, in which the Reader’s Digest was launched. It was to have a definite effect upon the sale of books it “digested” and to start a tremendous wave of magazine book digests. The English writer, A. S. M. Hutchinson, had two novels on the best seller list, with If Winter Comes, which sold 350,000 copies in its first ten months, in first place. The Sheik carried over into its second year, this time next to the leader. The Head of the House of Coombe brought Frances Hodgson Burnett into her fourth decade of best sellerdom. Simon Called Peter, a war novel dealing with a religious problem, was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and sold 152,000 copies. Maria Chapdelaine, with its background the northern Quebec woods, was a critical as well as a popular success. The Outline of History in its lower-priced edition made top place in non-fiction for the second year. Along with Hendrik Van Loon’s Story of Mankind, James Harvey Robinson’s Mind in the Making, and J. Arthur Thomson’s Outline of Science, it ushered in a period of “outline” books on various cultural and scientific subjects that was to reach a climax with the sales of The Story of Philosophy four years later. Edward Bok, who had made a reputation as editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, provided a new version of the American success story. Two health books achieved big sales. Lytton Strachey’s first outstanding biography was his life of Queen Victoria. Mirrors of Washington and Painted Windows followed in the anonymous footsteps of The Mirrors of Downing Street.

{135}

1923

All America was chanting “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Over in Germany Hitler’s beer hall Putsch missed fire. President Harding died, and Calvin Coolidge was quietly sworn in as President of the United{136} States by his father in a simple ceremony in a small New England village. All over the country the revived Ku Klux Klan flourished; white-sheeted men marched openly and fiery crosses burned at night. The magazine Time was founded in 1923. With Black Oxen, based on the rather sensational theme of physical rejuvenation, Gertrude Atherton achieved the great popular success of her long writing career. Babbitt and This Freedom held over into a second year on a fiction list of typical wide-audience appeal, marked with first appearances of Arthur Train and Rafael Sabatini. Etiquette, by Emily Post, who had previously been known as a novelist, topped non-fiction sales and developed into a staple bookstore item for the years to come. Papini’s Life of Christ, a presentation of the life of Jesus in terms of the new psychology, sold well over 100,000 copies in 1923. The Page Letters made a new record for a two-volume biography, with 75,000 sold in a year. Mrs. Peters’ Diet and Health, in its second year on the list, had just about reached 200,000. Robinson and Van Loon in their second years, Wells in his third, and Bok in his second, the latter with another book besides his Americanization on the list, gave evidence of the long life of non-fiction. Coué became a conversational byword through the ideas expressed in his little self-help book.

{137}

1924

Twenty-four votes for Underwood” rang through the nation as the 1924 Democratic Convention in the old Madison Square Garden on New York’s Madison Square went on through the hot summer{138} days and nights. At Aeolian Hall, Paul Whiteman brought jazz into the realm of classical music with his introduction of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to the concert stage. What Price Glory, realistic war drama, was the theatrical hit of the year. The Teapot Dome scandal thoroughly discredited the Harding regime, and Calvin Coolidge, who had become President upon Harding’s death, was reelected. Edna Ferber was a new name on best seller lists. Her So Big skyrocketed. The Plastic Age, a revelation of campus life and the “lost generation,” achieved the best sellerdom that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) never reached. Attempts to suppress Percy Marks’ novel only added to the demand for it. Anne Douglas Sedgwick returned to the list for the first time since 1912. In its third year, Diet and Health outsold every other non-fiction title. Papini’s Life of Christ, approaching 200,000, was in second place for the second year. The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, which has sold over 3,000,000 copies through its long career from its first publication in 1896, appeared in a new and best-selling edition. Etiquette continued to sell. A French writer, Andre Maurois, found a big American audience for his biography of Shelley. Shaw’s Saint Joan was one of the few dramas in all these years to make an annual list. The first and highly successful venture of the new publishing house of Simon and Schuster was that of putting cross word puzzles, long a newspaper feature, into book form. The demand was so great that this firm has continued ever since to publish several volumes of cross word puzzles and the later Double-Crostics each year. Since 1924 many novelty books of various kinds from Ask Me Another, Believe It Or Not and Boners to the photographic books of Clare Barnes, Jr., have followed in the wake of this first experiment.

{139}

1925

Coolidge prosperity—the Scopes case in Tennessee, in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued the theory of evolution, basis of the play Inherit the Wind in 1955—Red Grange—the{140} Florida boom—the crash of the Shenandoah—are all memories of 1925. Soundings, first in fiction, sold nearly 100,000 copies. Better remembered is The Constant Nymph, made into a stage hit and the basis of both British and American movies. Glorious Apollo, woven around the character of Byron, was the start of E. Barrington’s (Mrs. L. Adams Beck) extremely successful series of novels about real people of the past. Michael Arlen made a much talked-about hit with what was considered a daring novel, The Green Hat, later a highly successful stage play starring Katharine Cornell. Sinclair Lewis’ third novel, Arrowsmith, confirmed his place in American literature and probably was an important factor in his being awarded the Nobel Prize. Arrowsmith dealt with the medical profession as Babbitt had with the businessman and as Elmer Gantry was to deal, in 1927, with the ministry. Here was the first appearance of Anne Parrish, long a favorite writer. The records of both Diet and Health and The Boston Cooking School Cook Book gave evidence of the exceptionally energetic distribution of books which gave practical advice on the always popular subject of food. When We Were Very Young, permanent contribution to the literature of childhood by A. A. Milne, previously known chiefly as a playwright, was the first book in the field of semi-juvenile, semi-adult writing to hit the lists in many years. Bruce Barton topped Papini’s Life of Christ, then in its third year on the best seller lists, with an American businessman’s version of Jesus’ life. Lord Grey’s reminiscences gave a foretaste of the advent of more basic books on World War I than the reporters’ narratives published during and immediately after the war years.

{141}

1926

The middle 1920’s were the years of pioneering along the air lanes of the world. Admiral Byrd made the first flight over the North Pole in 1926. Babe Ruth became Sultan of Swat. Philadelphia opened the Sesquicentennial Exhibition. In Germany, Hitler’s Mein Kampf had{142} been published. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which was to introduce an extremely successful method of marketing books, was founded in 1926. New fiction writers were coming to the fore in America—John Erskine, with his first great hit, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, historical fiction written in a new manner; Warwick Deeping, English author, whose Sorrell and Son found a responsive note in thousands of American hearts (his book marking the first appearance of the firm of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., on the annual best seller lists); and P. C. Wren, whose more popular Beau Geste was published late in the previous year and did not make the 1925 list, and whose second book, Beau Sabreur, also appeared among 1926 best sellers. Galsworthy was at the height of his American sales, with one of the novels in The Modern Comedy, companion volume to The Forsyte Saga. Edna Ferber followed So Big with the perennially famous Show Boat, familiar to all Americans as book, play, movie, and song. With his Man Nobody Knows heading non-fiction, Bruce Barton added an interpretation of the Bible in his series of books on practical religion. George Dorsey rode the wave of the new interest in psychology with Why We Behave Like Human Beings, and Diet and Health continued on in its fifth year, the new edition of The Boston Cooking School Cook Book in its third. Mark Sullivan’s first volume of Our Times marked a new interest in our recent past that was continued some years later by such books as Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday. Evidence of the bridge craze was the 65,000 copies of Milton Work’s new manual ordered before publication and the sale of over 100,000 copies of Foster’s Simplified Auction Bridge within ten months after publication. (“Contract” had not yet come along.) Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, which had previously appeared in part in the five-cent booklets published as Little Blue Books by the Haldeman-Julius Co. of Wichita, Kansas, marked the peak of the “outline” era, selling 95,000 copies in 1926 alone.

{143}

1927

Mechanical and scientific progress continued in 1927, height of the whole period of invention and exploration that followed World War I. Lindbergh made the flight to Paris that thrilled the world, and later in the year wrote about it in a book that became a best seller. Ford pro{144}duced his new Model A, the first Ford with a gear shift. The Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River was officially opened. The stock market was booming. The disastrous Mississippi floods occurred the same year that the musical play based upon Edna Ferber’s novel of Ol’ Man River was produced in New York. The Literary Guild, following book marketing methods similar to those of the Book-of-the-Month Club, started to function in 1927, and one of its first selections, Trader Horn, made the yearly list. The publication of Elmer Gantry with an initial printing of 100,000 copies and sales of over 200,000 in the first ten weeks found Sinclair Lewis at the peak of popularity. Booth Tarkington was high on the list. So was Warwick Deeping, with two books; Sorrell and Son, holding over from 1926, sold 133,830 copies in the two years. Mazo de la Roche, a Canadian contributor to American best seller lists, like Gilbert Parker, Ralph Connor, and Louis Hémon of past years, made a great hit with Jalna, first book in a notable series about the Whiteoak family of Canada. The ninth volume in the series, but the earliest chronologically, was published seventeen years afterward, in 1944, and there were more Jalna stories in the ’50’s. Louis Bromfield made his first appearance on the list with A Good Woman. The Story of Philosophy was the outstanding non-fiction title of the year. Emil Ludwig, who was to write so many popular biographies, revived the always latent interest in Napoleon. Revolt in the Desert was a book of permanent historical importance by the great English hero of World War I, the mysterious and daring Lawrence of Arabia. Trader Horn came from South Africa to tell tall tales which caught the public’s fancy. As Simon and Schuster had done, a new firm, the Viking Press, scored its first best-selling success with a series of novelty books. Its Ask Me Another quiz book was an immediate hit, selling 100,000 copies in its first four weeks and becoming the first of a series which made quizzes a popular pastime for years—perhaps germinating “Information Please!” and the “$64,000 Question.” With two best sellers in 1927, Richard Halliburton captured a public which wanted adventure with glamour, a trend in travel and escape reading that had begun with O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas a number of years before. Dorsey carried on the interest in popular science, and in Mother India Katherine Mayo wrote the first book to make a large audience aware of modern India’s problems.

{145}

1928

With the outward scars of World War I healed, war itself outlawed by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the big bull market well under way, Americans were flocking to Europe by every conceivable means, from{146} freighter to mammoth liner. Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly the Atlantic. At home, gangsters, bootleggers, and racketeers were riding high. The first all-talking movie, The Lights of New York, was presented, and Walt Disney was working on his first Mickey Mouse picture. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a novel that attained such fame that the Pulitzer Prize committee departed from its usual custom of giving its award to a story laid in the United States, was leader of 1928 fiction. This novel with a South American background, Thornton Wilder’s first great success, sold 240,000 copies in its first year. English writers with devoted American audiences were next on the list. A new writer of detective stories, S. S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright), flashed into the book world with big sales. The Greene Murder Case was one of the first of many novels that made Philo Vance almost as familiar a fictional character as Sherlock Holmes, and the first detective story to appear on an annual list since Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Window at the White Cat in 1910. Booth Tarkington’s Claire Ambler had an added interest because it was the first book to be issued under the new imprint of Doubleday, Doran & Co., a merger of the old firms of Doubleday, Page and George H. Doran. Biography was the subject of about half the non-fiction list. André Maurois followed his successful Ariel with the life of Disraeli. Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon held over into its second year and he added a biography of Goethe to the list. American antipathy to all things German having subsided, readers devoured Lowell Thomas’ account of a German war hero’s exploits. Mother India and We were both best sellers for the second year. Eugene O’Neill’s play, widely publicized for its feat of holding audiences through five hours, with intermission for dinner, sold well in book form. Admiral Byrd followed Lindbergh’s account of sky adventure with his story of his 1926 flight to the North Pole. Bernard Shaw addressed the intelligent woman on political theory.

{147}

1929

The Coolidge boom turned into Hoover prosperity, only to totter in September with the first warning crash of this country’s greatest financial depression. But the market still wavered on the brink of disaster, and book sales were booming. The great novel of World War I, All{148} Quiet on the Western Front, written by a German, appeared eleven years after the war’s close, to sell 300,000 in its first year. It was issued here in a first printing of 100,000; 700,000 were printed in Germany. Famous all over the world, it was made into a Hollywood super-feature. Sinclair Lewis did another portrait of the American businessman in Dodsworth, a book that was made into a highly successful play, later a movie. S. S. Van Dine’s Bishop Murder Case was as high on the list as his Greene Murder Case had been. Ole Rölvaag’s Peder Victorious was a sequel to his first novel of the Dakota prairies, Giants in the Earth (1927). American regional literature was awakening more and more interest. The South provided two new novelists of distinction, DuBose Heyward of Porgy fame, and Julia Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize with her first book. Perfecting its technique for selecting and developing best sellers, the young firm of Simon & Schuster, which had started only five years previously with The Cross Word Puzzle Book, was responsible for four books on the non-fiction list. The Art of Thinking, by a French writer, caught on with a public interested in self-improvement and sold 125,000 in 1929. The sensational spit-in-the-wind Cradle of the Deep followed in Trader Horn’s footsteps. Believe It or Not, first of Robert Ripley’s collections of his popular newspaper features, went over 50,000. The Mansions of Philosophy did not become the great success that Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy had been. Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth and Essex were added to the many notable biographies of the period. Word-of-mouth publicity made Chic Sale’s tiny little book of decidedly homely humor a runaway best seller. Since 1929 its sales have exceeded 1,000,000 copies. Walter Lippmann, outstanding political commentator, made his first appearance among best sellers in 1929. John Brown’s Body, one of the early selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, attained unusual sales for a book of poetry, in this case one long narrative poem. Its first printing was 70,000 copies. At that time the Book-of-the-Month Club’s membership was about 50,000.

{149}

1930

1930 was a year of financial depression, bank crashes, brokers’ suicides, and the unemployed selling apples on the streets of New York, with people turning to the inexpensive diversion of miniature golf to take their minds off money troubles. France started to build the Magi{150}not Line that was designed to protect her forever from military aggression. Edna Ferber led fiction sales for the second time in six years. Her Cimarron was a story of pioneer Oklahoma. The fame of his first novel carried Thornton Wilder’s story of ancient Greece high on the list, though interest in it quickly flagged. Years of Grace was the first novel by a new writer from Chicago; it won the Pulitzer Prize and made its author one of the established favorites in the fiction scene. The Good Companions, published in 1929, had made a great audience for the English novelist, playwright, and essayist, J. B. Priestley, an audience that eagerly bought his new book, Angel Pavement. Mrs. Rinehart scored with another mystery novel twenty-one years after her Man in Lower Ten had become one of the first American best sellers in the detective fiction field. Hers was the first best seller on these lists to be published by the new firm of Farrar & Rinehart—established by John Farrar, formerly editor of The Bookman, and two of Mrs. Rinehart’s sons. The first book of the Herries Chronicle by Hugh Walpole was an immediate favorite and founded a fictional dynasty that rivaled Galsworthy’s Forsytes in popularity. A young American writer scored a big success with Young Man of Manhattan (also a Farrar & Rinehart publication), combining realism and romance in a story of the uproarious 1920’s. In non-fiction, leader of the year was Dr. Axel Munthe’s Story of San Michele, one of those freak best sellers that start out in a modest way, catch on through recommendation by one reader to another until sales begin to pile up and advertising takes over. This, the first of the best-selling “doctor” books, has sold 181,000 copies. The vogue for autobiographies by notables or unusual figures in the professions began, but neither lawyers nor preachers have proved as magnetic in the literary field as doctors. The sensational Strange Death of President Harding (300,000 sold) had been preceded in 1927 by another book of the same caliber, The President’s Daughter, revealing unsavory Washington scandal in an era of corruption. Byron was Maurois’ third consecutive success, and Ludwig again offered a biography to an assured public. James Truslow Adams and the Beards made their first appearances as best-selling historians. Will James rose to popularity with his cowboy reminiscences and drawings. The Durant and Wells books both returned to the lists in new dollar editions.

{151}

1931

Contract bridge hit the nation with full force in this year of continued depression. Katharine Cornell was appearing on Broadway in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (one of the most popular plays presented for American soldiers overseas in World War II) and “De Lawd” made his appearance in The Green Pastures. Of Thee I Sing, with George Gershwin’s music, was the first musical play ever to{152} win the Pulitzer Prize. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, topped all novels of the year, making a permanent place in our literature for itself and her other novels of China. Mrs. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Her book marked the first appearance on these lists of a publication of the John Day Company. There were five novelists new among best sellers in 1931, all of them women, all American but one. Willa Cather’s books had been highly esteemed and widely read for years, but not until publication of Shadows on the Rock did one of them become a leading best seller. Bess Streeter Aldrich’s preceding book, A Lantern in Her Hand, had won many readers by word-of-mouth publicity, gaining an audience for her next, A White Bird Flying. Grand Hotel, by the only one of the five not an American, is the most famous of them all. Fannie Hurst, fifth new name on the list, already had a great following among magazine and book readers, but it was Back Street that put her among the top-ranking best sellers. A new woman writer topped non-fiction, too, a member of the Russian royal family, the sale of whose autobiography reflected the widespread interest in Russia. Through all these years many memoirs of imperial and revolutionary times in that country were published; interest was awakened also in the Soviet experiment, with other writers like M. Ilin, whose New Russia’s Primer was tenth on the list, exploring postwar Russia. Washington Merry-Go-Round was a natural successor to Mirrors of Washington of nearly a decade before, but it packed more dynamite. Published anonymously, it proved to have been written by columnists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen. Boners was another fad book in the Cross Word Puzzle, Ask Me Another and Believe It or Not line. With several succeeding volumes it sold into the hundreds of thousands. As the new contract bridge replaced auction, there was demand for new guides to the game; Ely Culbertson was the one who cashed in on the opportunity in a big way, taking the place held by Milton Work five years before, later to be succeeded himself by Charles Goren with his “point count” system. Edna St. Vincent Millay reached the list for the first time with Fatal Interview, and thus became the first new best-selling writer of serious poetry besides Stephen Vincent Benét since World War I days.

{153}

1932

In the worst year of the depression came the bonus march on Washington and the ensuing battle of Anacostia Flats. James J. Walker resigned under a cloud as Mayor of New York City. Radio was in full swing, with Rudy Vallee its topnotch artist. Father Coughli{154}n’s radio talks were gaining listeners. Technocracy was the newest theory on how to cure the depression. Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh’s small son was kidnaped from his crib in Hopewell, N. J. Over in China, Japan seized Shanghai in her undeclared war on that country. The Good Earth headed fiction for a second year, with Pearl Buck’s second novel, continuing the story of the same Chinese family, taking third place. The Fountain, in second place, received unusual critical attention. From England too came Magnolia Street, Inheritance, with which Macmillan vigorously reentered the field of best-selling fiction, and Three Loves, A. J. Cronin’s first best seller. Ellen Glasgow and Booth Tarkington both continued their many years’ popularity. Lloyd Douglas came rather quietly into the list in eighth place. He was a retired minister, over fifty, when his first novel was published. It was a book that caught on throughout the country, chiefly in the Midwest, by word-of-mouth personal recommendation, the first of many novels that were to put him in the highest ranks of best-selling novelists. James Truslow Adams, who had been developing a reputation as an American historian, found a popular audience with two books, one of which, first in non-fiction in 1932, had also appeared on the previous year’s list. Frederick Lewis Allen of Harper’s Magazine, as Mark Sullivan had done, found a waiting audience of people who enjoyed reading about things they remembered, events of the not-too-far-distant past. Vash Young, businessman like Bruce Barton before him, combined inspirational writing with practical advice in a little volume timed for that period of financial depression when salesmen particularly needed a lift. Hendrik Van Loon, going under Simon & Schuster’s sponsorship, added another volume to his illustrated surveys of human knowledge. Ernest Dimnet followed his Art of Thinking with a new book, as did Pearson and Allen with More Merry-Go-Round. Their first book was still selling merrily, switching during the course of the year into a reprint edition. The trade policy regarding reprints was changing and non-fiction titles were now released much more quickly in popular-priced editions. Clarence Darrow, who seven years before had shared the spotlight in the Scopes trial, wrote a best-selling autobiography.

{155}

1933

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” was the theme song of 1933 as Franklin D. Roosevelt, taking office as chief executive of the nation, quickly declared a bank holiday. The NRA and the AAA were created. The World’s Fair opened in Chicago. Tobacco Road, which by{156} 1939 was to break the record for successive Broadway performances, was produced. The United States abandoned the gold standard, liquor made a legitimate reappearance with the repeal of the 18th Amendment, the speakeasy era passed out of existence, and the public took up jigsaw puzzles in a big way. In Berlin the Reichstag was burned. Anthony Adverse, selling 300,000 copies in its first six months, captured readers of many levels of taste and turned public interest definitely toward the historical novel for the first time since the early decades of the century. Anthony Adverse, too, began a trend toward the novel of unusual length, a feature which hit the fancy of the public again in Gone with the Wind. Continuing its big-time fiction drive begun with Phyllis Bentley’s Inheritance in 1932, Macmillan found in Gladys Hasty Carroll a new writer from Maine. Lewis, Aldrich, and Bromfield repeated best-seller performances, as did Galsworthy with his third book in the new saga and Mrs. Aldrich with a predecessor of Mr. Chips and Miss Dove. Lloyd Douglas’ Magnificent Obsession climbed steadily. In tenth place appeared a new writer from Germany, Hans Fallada, author of the first fiction success for the firm that had up till now been outstanding in non-fiction. A new self-help book hit the non-fiction top for a long run, selling 88,897 copies in 1933, of a total 164,000 sale. Biography, with characters from France, Russia, China, and a doctor’s story, The Arches of the Years, took four of the places on the list. Kallet and Schlink issued their interpretation of the claims of modern advertising in 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, a volume that led the way for many other books of the “exposure” type and drew increased attention to consumer movements. Culbertson continued to sell year after year. As Woodrow Wilson had done twenty years before, Franklin Roosevelt began his administration with a best-selling book on his policies. For the first time the firms of Whittlesey House, Morrow, and the Vanguard Press made their appearance on these lists. 1933 also saw a best seller from Appleton-Century, a combination of two publishing houses which had been individually responsible for many best-selling titles since the beginning of these records.

{157}

1934

The Townsend plan and Upton Sinclair’s EPIC party followed on the heels of Technocracy as economic cure-alls. Dillinger, greatest American bandit of the era, was killed, and the Dionne quintuplets were born. Parisians rioted over evidence of government corruption, and{158} F.D.R. signed the Philippine Independence Act. Dust storms devastated Kansas and Oklahoma. Anthony Adverse sold 176,100 more copies in 1934, bringing it to the top of the fiction list again, but this was only the beginning! The South contributed two new novelists, Caroline Miller with the Pulitzer Prize novel, Lamb in His Bosom, and Stark Young with So Red the Rose, both books laid in the old South. Another two-year period of best-sellerdom began with James Hilton’s first success, Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, the first book, too, to achieve country-wide fame through radio commendation—the book about which Alexander Woollcott went “quietly mad.” There were seven new names on the list in all. The English writer, Phyllis Bottome, scored a hit with her story of insanity, marking a trend toward novels studying abnormal psychological situations. Mary Ellen Chase, who had taught English to two decades of Smith College girls, proved that she herself could write vigorously. Mary Peters was another Maine story and subject of another big Macmillan promotion campaign. Alice Tisdale Hobart wrote a telling story of China; and Seven Gothic Tales introduced an author from Denmark whose unique tales created a devoted audience for her work in this country. Alexander Woollcott had become radio’s favorite voice and expert story-teller as well as book promoter. People bought his own book, While Rome Burns, as well as those he recommended. In 1934 While Rome Burns sold 83,545 copies. Eventually it reached a sale of over 500,000. Life Begins at Forty was second in 1934, and another self-help book, You Must Relax, was in ninth place. Louis Adamic’s extremely interesting account of his native Yugoslavia found many readers, as did Carl Carmer’s picturesque interpretation of the State of Alabama, a book that inspired a popular song and laid the foundations for the author’s reputation in the field of American folklore. A century-old book by the prince of best sellers, Charles Dickens, was rescued for a time from obscurity.

{159}

1935

The Nazis, in full power in Germany, began their anti-Jewish campaign. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. In the United States the social security laws were passed and the WPA was inaugurated. Will Rogers was killed in an airplane crash. Boondoggling, Huey Long, and cafe society were conversational topics. Swing music hit the country, with{160} Benny Goodman its leading exponent. Porgy and Bess, originating in DuBose Heyward’s novel, Porgy, was the first musical produced by the Theatre Guild. With his third book, which sold 103,286 copies in 1935, Lloyd Douglas became the most popular novelist in the country. Ellen Glasgow, who had been a best seller for nearly four decades, achieved a high place with her latest novel. Six years previously, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel had brought him into literary prominence. His second novel, Of Time and the River, found a popular audience. Rachel Field, widely known as a writer of books for children and as their illustrator as well, made a national reputation with an adult novel. James Hilton’s Mr. Chips went into its second year. One of his earlier novels, now reissued and also praised by Mr. Woollcott, was close behind it on the list. Both books were to repeat their fame as movies. By now book club printings had reached about 75,000 copies. Although no yearly records were kept of juvenile best sellers, it is interesting to note that a famous juvenile, The Little Colonel, brought out in reprint edition, sold 100,000 copies in 1935. The name of Lindbergh reappeared on the non-fiction list after eight years. This time it was Anne Morrow Lindbergh who wrote of air adventure. It was her literary skill as well as her name, with all its associations from the first Paris flight through the tragic events of kidnaping and trial, that made her book non-fiction top seller of the year, reaching 185,000 copies. While Rome Burns, first in 1934, was second in 1935. Life with Father, as a book, laid the groundwork for the famous play’s record run on Broadway. Vincent Sheean’s Personal History forecast the important part that newspapermen were to play in the field of books during the coming war years. The foundations for the success of Seven Pillars of Wisdom had been laid eight years previously by Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert. The legend of the man had grown and this, with a notable publicity campaign, accounted for the fact that an expensive book, one that was not “written down” for the sake of appeal to a wide public, was a best seller of the year. Revolt in the Desert had been in fact a popularization of part of the original Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Notable biographies by Hackett, Zweig, and Freeman had many readers. Hans Zinsser popularized some interesting aspects of medical lore; and Skin Deep became still another best-selling “consumer” book, following 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs.

{161}

1936