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.