It was a big book yearaccording to the adding machines. The grand total of titles published would come to something like 7,500 in 1946, including about 1,500 works of fiction, 300 histories, 400 biographies. The quality of the books, of course, was another matter.
Critics generally kept their hats on, and their praise well-modulated. In the New York Times "outstanding-books-of-the-year" poll of critics, not a single book got the votes of all reviewers. The best that could be said was that 1946 furnished spectacular cash-register successes. Betty MacDonald's cackling (1945) hen epic, The Egg and I, went to some 1,200,000 copies; Peace...
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