Critics may know what readers should read, but it is the booksellers who are sure they know what readers want. Last December, glooming over low fiction sales, Retail Bookseller bluntly expressed a credo of the trade: "The truth is that the public really doesn't want books worth buying so much as books that everybody is talking about ... a book like Forever Amber, a book that the righteous and the literary will deplore . . ."
Four months later, as though in answer to this prayer, came Kathleen Winsor's potboiler about an amoral woman,...
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