best seller

best seller, book that, for a time, leads all others of its kind in sales, a designation that serves as an index of popular literary taste and judgment.

Bookman, an American magazine of literature and criticism, began running best-seller lists in 1895, when it began publication. The list was compiled from reports of sales at bookstores throughout the country. Similar lists began to appear in other literary magazines and in metropolitan newspapers. The lists most commonly considered authoritative in the United States are those of Publishers Weekly and The New York Times. The practice spread from the United States; the British list generally considered most authoritative is that of The Sunday Times (London). In the first decade of the 21st century, the best-seller lists of Amazon.com provided a snapshot of global sales.

Such lists are obviously of greatest use to publishers and booksellers. From the beginning there has been a tendency among both critics and the general public to suppose that because a book is a best seller it cannot have literary merit. This is not necessarily true.

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Students of popular literary taste point out that the leading categories of books, in terms of sales, are typically religious and “inspirational” books, books of advice for self-improvement, romantic and semihistorical novels, and novels of sex and sensationalism. Excluded from such lists are the works of William Shakespeare, the Bible, and direct-mail and book-club sales. The all-time best seller in the English-speaking world—said to be unequaled in sales—is the Bible. Indeed, in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, the only book estimated to have rivaled the Bible’s sales in a given month was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), a historical novel set in the South during the American Civil War and Reconstruction periods.

Other all-time best-selling titles, such as Charles Monroe Sheldon’s In His Steps (published in book form in 1897), Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942), and Henry Morton Robinson’s The Cardinal (1950), reveal the popularity of books with religious themes. Also highly popular among American readers are books of self-improvement or self-help, some also flavored with religious overtones, such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), Thomas Harris’s I’m O.K., You’re O.K. (1969), and Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life (2002).

Other categories that are highly successful are cookbooks (Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, first published in 1930, sold more than 18 million copies during the middle decades of the 20th century), crime (both fiction and nonfiction—e.g., Mario Puzo’s The Godfather [1969] and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men [1974]), and thrillers (e.g., Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code [2003]). The taboo against sexual explicitness that earlier resulted in censorship or moral disapproval had disappeared by the second half of the 20th century, so that Jacqueline Susann’s novel Valley of the Dolls (1966) and David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1969) were both among the top 20 all-time best sellers of the 20th century in the United States.

The advent of the mass-produced paperback, in the late 1930s, resulted in separate paperback best-seller lists beginning in 1976. Subsequent decades witnessed a proliferation of types of lists that tracked sales variously by format (e.g., hardback, mass-market paperback, trade paperback) and by genre broadly and narrowly defined (e.g., fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, manga). The rise in popularity of e-books in the early 21st century added yet another format to be assessed; by 2011, when the The New York Times introduced electronic formats to its lists, the newspaper was reporting best sellers in 20 categories ranging from “combined print and e-book nonfiction” and “e-book fiction” to “paperback graphic books” and “hardcover advice and miscellaneous.”

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