The Gutenberg Fallacy

70 YEARS OF BEST SELLERS 1895-1965 by Alice Payne Hackett. 246 pages. R. R. Bowker. $7.90.

What is a bestseller, anyway? The phrase is handy but hardly precise. Biggest-seller or most-seller would be more accurate, since the connotation of quality in "best" is frequently undeserved. And there is doubt even as to quantity. A novel that sells 5,000 copies in one week may edge onto the weekly lists (usually compiled from bookstore reports), rub titles with yearlong, million-copy works and fade into the remainder stores after a few weeks.

This newly updated compilation of titles and statistics by Alice Payne Hackett, an editor of the trade magazine Publisher's Weekly, gives a highly useful perspective on the long-range trends beyond the weekly ups and downs, and also includes such items as dictionaries and cookbooks, which the weekly compilations omit. The volume shows how the paperback and population explosions have altered the bestseller concept. A really warm item in 1904 was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which so far has sold 1.4 million copies, nearly all of them in hard cover (it is still in print). Forever Amber has sold 1,652,837 hard-cover copies since it was published in 1944. Such once eminently respectable figures are dwarfed by the paperback trade. Peyton Place has sold only 600,000 copies in hard cover since 1956, but paperback sales added 9,300,000 more.

Miss Hackett's accounting emphasizes that there is a Gutenberg Fallacy lurking in bookdom's galaxy. To begin with, something that looks like a book and is sold in a bookstore is not necessarily a book. It could be a nonbook, or as Miss Hackett would say, a "nonreading" book. A lifelong career woman in the book business, she thus distinguishes between reading books and nonreading books much as an alcoholic or a barman would describe bourbon and branch water as a drink and Metrecal as a non-drink--liquid food, perhaps. In any event, the nonreading category consists of two main classes, the "how-to" and the "self-help." After the Bible, whose varied editions and vast sales are beyond specific reckoning, the top sellers of all time among all books (see box) are Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care and the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.

The predominance of such works may be a sign of a breakdown in family technology since the days when the arts of burping and diapering, of baking, basting and berry-bottling, were passed directly from mother to daughter. Similarly, today's boy is caught early in the educational status mill, so that by the time he acquires a split-level of his own, he has failed to learn from Dad, and so must learn from a book, the management of hammer, nails, plane, saw, screwdriver and puttymanship needed to keep the place from falling about his and his loved ones' ears.

And what of "reading" books? Here it seems that the most depressing of all laws--Gresham's, that bad money drives out the good--applies as mercilessly to good books as it does to funny money. The man who has sold the most novels is Erie Stanley Gardner--159 million copies of 125 titles. At least he is a highly competent mystery craftsman. The author who has sold the most in single-copy titles is the semiliterate fantasist of violence and squalor, Mickey Spillane, who has written seven novels that have never sold less than 4,000,000 copies apiece.

Paradise Lost. The record shows that year by year, readers tended to be more discriminating in their choice of nonfiction than fiction. In 1920, John Maynard Keynes was duly recognized for his The Economic Consequences of the Peace (No. 2 in nonfiction). But the No. 1 novelist of the year was Zane Grey, author of The Man of the Forest. Nowhere in the top ten was there mention of This Side of Paradise, the first novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Similarly, the reader of nonfiction in 1922 kept ahead of the novel nut. H. G. Wells's The Outline of History and Hendrik Willem Van Loon's The Story of Mankind led the nonfiction list that year. The top novel was If Winter Comes, by the leading bleeder of the year, A.S.M. Hutchinson, whose This Freedom was No. 7, followed by Edith M. Hull's The Sheik. Sinclair Lewis' great period piece, Babbitt, did make the first ten, sharing last place with a forgotten field of corn called Helen of the Old House, by Harold Bell Wright. It is salutary to note that the first English translation of Proust's Swanris Way did not make the scene at all.

In 1924, Diet and Health, by Lulu Hunt Peters, ruled the nonfiction list; Shaw's St. Joan made eighth place. In fiction, Edna Ferber's So Big was that big--but E. M. Forster couldn't make the first ten with A Passage to India. The 1925 fiction list gave first place to A. Hamilton Gibbs's Soundings, while Lewis' Arrowsmith took seventh place. But even then, Scott Fitzgerald's reputation was not strong enough to install The Great Gatsby among the top ten. Also missing: Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

A curious year for literature, as well as economics, was 1929, when four works of immutable quality failed to make Miss Hackett's Big Board: two masterworks of William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Sartoris; Thomas Wolfe's great epic of narcissism, family piety and nostalgia, Look Homeward, Angel; and Ernest Hemingway's pseudo-tough romance A Farewell to Arms ("You won't do our things with another girl?" whispered the dying nurse).

Ulysses Nudged. This is a list, like the criminal archives of the homicide bureau, for the social anthropologist and the moralist to brood upon. Many of the items on these dolorous statistics may make one skeptical of universal literacy.

In the year 1930, which saw the publication of Kafka's The Castle, most people were reading Edna Ferber's Cimarron; in 1934, the year of Malraux's Man's Fate, the thing to read was a massive romance called Anthony Adverse. That was also the year in which Random House, after winning a celebrated court case, published for the first time in the U.S. James Joyce's 1922 classic Ulysses. Although it does not make the grade on Miss Hackett's lists, Ulysses, nudged by a generation of college English instructors, may yet reach a million; it has sold only 570,300 so far. Perhaps one can see in this the workings of an amendment to Gresham's Law of Literature--that the bad verbal coinage drives out the good, but only for a while, after which sound currency reasserts its values.

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