Battle of the Books

For years, book publishers have grumbled among themselves about U.S. newspapers' bestseller lists; the book trade held that they should be made more accurate or they should be abolished. This week the Saturday Review of Literature shouted the same thing out loud with a three-page blast at the "respectable [but] hardly scientific" Sunday lists of the New York Times and Herald Tribune.

Saturday Review started out with an observation that any casual reader could make: the lists disagree on many books. Example: in 1948, the Times had The Naked and the Dead in first place for 19 weeks; the Tribune had it there for only ten weeks. One reason, said S.R.L., is that the lists are based "on figures obtained from relatively few stores in relatively few cities . . . without reference to the most elementary rules of statistical sampling." The Herald Tribune, said S.R.L., gets its reports from 67 stores in 50 cities (actually, says the Trib, 60 to 80 stores report each week), but Macy's, one of the biggest U.S. book retailers, is not even represented. (Neither are the book clubs.) The Times listed reports from "leading booksellers" in 22 cities (coincidentally, this week it boosted the reporting cities to 34).

On the Map. In the bestseller lists, said S.R.L., reporting bookstores are not weighted as to sales volume. "Thus, the Greenwood Book Shop in Wilmington speaks with the same power as Marshall Field in Chicago, largest book outlet in the Midwest . . ." It cited Harcourt, Brace & Co., which had checked the actual publishers' figures of other bestsellers against the sales this year of its The Seven Storey Mountain, which was in eleventh place in the Times nonfiction list. Said Harcourt a month ago, in an ad in the Times: Mountain is actually leading the list. If any publisher could show better sales on a "list" book, "we will buy this space for him to say so next Monday." There were no takers. Next week Mountain jumped to third, is now second.

S.R.L. thought that booksellers were as much to blame as the papers. Some, it charged, reported slow-selling books as "bestsellers" to step up sales. Others were influenced by "literary snobbishness." S.R.L. suggested an Audit Bureau of Bestsellers, to function something like the press's Audit Bureau of Circulation. It was time "that the book trade cooperated in a certified, scientific, irrefutable system ..."

In the Teapot. Book publishers said such a bureau would not work, but many were delighted with the S.R.L. story. Said Executive Editor Lee Barker of Doubleday: "I know the story is completely accurate . . . I'm so heartily sick of all the complete foolishness of bestseller lists." But the Times and Tribune were not so pleased. Said Times Sunday Editor Lester Markel: "They made the survey without asking what the Times method is. We think ours ... is as good as it can be."

Tribune Books Editor Irita Van Doren said her sampling was broader than S.R.L. indicated. Said she: "If anybody could suggest any real way to get around weaknesses in the bestseller lists, I would be glad to do it." For the moment, the Times and the Tribune planned no changes.

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