Best Sellers

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at best sellers throughout history.

With the putative literary recrudescence of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber it is quite difficult (perhaps impossible) to make the case that we, as a book-reading people, are becoming more educated. And I have no intention of making that claim, but I have long had the suspicion that no matter how bad things appear now, chances are they used to be similarly bad.

I recently went to the library and looked in the section where they keep the books about the history of best sellers – which sadly enough seem to never quite achieve best-sellerdom themselves. I wanted to have a quick look at what books have apparently so moved the American public of the vaunted past that we bought a great number of them. There are quite a few works dealing with this subject, and most of them are far too trenchant or polemical for my tastes. I was (and remain) far more interested in shoring up some pet theory than in doing actual research. So I passed over books such as 80 Years of Best Sellers (1895-1975), and Making the List – A Cultural History of the American Bestseller.

Then I found a dusty little book from 1947 by Frank Luther Mott, which had the engaging and slightly unseemly title of Golden Multitudes – The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, and it fit the bill perfectly. It had several appendices in the back that gave a nice, succinct account of those books that were ‘best sellers’, and also those that were merely ‘better sellers’.

I turned to the best sellers of yore, searching for clues about our national literary character. And I should add that by yore I mean ‘some time around 100 years ago’, because I thought this was the meaning of the word that would best suit the case that I wanted to make. And as almost always happens when I set out to prove one of my pet theories, I failed.

The best sellers of a hundred years ago cannot hold a candle (or much of anything) to the worst of the bookish excrescences of our day. That’s the bad news. But the good news, in a way, is that these long-ago best sellers seemed to be of an exceedingly ephemeral nature – therefore I think there is no reason to believe that the dreck we publish today will have any more of a half-life than that of its predecessors.

For every title listed that I recognize, such as The Call of the Wild, there are a half dozen more that I’ve never heard of. It is entirely possible that this says more about my own lack of education than it does about the fugacity of our taste, but I have a feeling that there are not so many people today, educated or not, who are sitting about mourning the lack of attention being paid to books such as Freckles (Gene Stratton Porter), Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Alice Hegan Rice), and Graustark (George Barr McCutcheon). These were all best selling books at the beginning of the twentieth century, at least according to the author of Golden Multitudes.

As I sit here and examine these appendices of the books our nation has loved (or at least purchased in great quantities) over yore and then some, I cannot help but think that there have indeed been some periods more fruitful than others. The 1780’s saw best-sellerhood for Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and Alexander Hamilton, all of whom have stood some sort of test of time. And the 1840’s were a fruitful time for Dickens and Dumas, Thackeray and the Brontë sisters, worthies all.

But what of the 1860’s, which saw a proliferation of best sellers by authors with heavily initialized names and largely forgotten books? Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney scored great success with Faith Gartney’s Girlhood in 1863. Not to be outdone, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth one-upped her with a fourth initial, and two-upped her with best sellers, hitting the charts three times in the decade, with The Fatal Marriage, Ishmael, and Self-Raised.

I am going to propose a moratorium on teeth-gnashing about soon to be published books ostensibly written by, or with, failed and minor political figures. If this phenomenon truly bothers you, there are a large number of formerly best selling books that are likely quite good, and are begging for some renewed attention. Pick up a copy of something by A.D.T. Whitney or E.D.E.N. Southworth, and maybe Joe the Plumber’s book won’t even dent your consciousness when it is released.

If you are feeling particularly adventurous your can turn your gaze even further back, to the best seller lists of our country before it was even our country. The author of Golden Multitudes assures me that in the 17th century the book charts were ruled by Michael Wigglesworth. Not only did he have a best seller in 1662 with The Day of Doom, but he followed this up in 1670 with a better seller, title Meat Out of the Eater. Maybe our reading hasn’t declined as much as we think.