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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.