Taking the annual bestseller lists of The Bookman (1900-1912) and Publishers Weekly (1912-1999) as his starting point, Michael Korda -- who has an impressive record of writing and editing bestsellers himself -- looks at the twentieth century American cultural landscape through the prism of its popular reading. The bestseller list, he notes, has much to tell us about what's on our mind, while offering tantalizing glimpses of our collective dreams, illusions, and nightmares as well.
Devoting a chapter to each decade, Korda scrutinizes the annual lists and points up the historical, social, and publishing trends that have fashioned the bestsellers and, in some cases, been fostered by them. War, censorship, political scandal, diet crazes, TV talk shows, superagents, and superstores all play a part in this story -- a tale of risk-taking and safe bets, of old guards and young Turks, of net sales and gross margins, of "banned in Boston" and "soon to be a major motion picture."
With solid facts as well as personal anecdotes culled from a lifetime on the bestseller battlefield, Korda sifts though both the enduring and alluringly faddish. He assays the generations of novels, big and small, that have most appealed to us, but also recounts the long lineage of non-fiction blockbusters designed to lift our spirits, boost our self-esteem, or reduce our waistlines.
The one hundred annual bestseller lists included in Making the List are equally evocative: long-running favorite titles and one-season successes live cheek by jowl on these lists; books by authors for the ages and by those now to be found only in yesterday's society pages peacefully coexist. What may surprise the reader most, however, is how little the types of books that achieve bestseller status changed through the century.
Though Korda wisely admits that the ways of bestsellerdom are often mysterious, that no one can get it 100 percent right when it comes to doping out just what makes a bestseller, Making the List proves him to be a fascinated student, witty observer, and canny guide to the fashions and fortunes of the bestseller list -- and of the reading public.
Excerpts
From the Introduction...
The bestseller list is such a part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine how the book business, let alone authors, readers, and booksellers, could get along without it.
Of course it’s a mixed blessing, in the eyes of most social and literary critics, since the bestseller list in their view tends to favor popular “storytellers” over more “literary” novelists, celebrities over the unknown, “repeat” authors who write a book every year or so over those who write more slowly or those whose first book has just been published, people with trendy medical, sociological, or self improvement schemes over writers who have spent a lifetime studying more “serious” subjects, brazen self-promoters over the shy, awkward, or physically unprepossessing, and so on.
All this is true up to a point, on the face of things. Certainly anybody packing a book bag for a long trip, as I have just done, with the intention of putting in some serious reading time, is unlikely to limit himself to the most recent big bestsellers, and most of us have favorite writers whose books never once appeared on the bestseller list. (Just so there are no secrets between us, my book bag contained the four large paperback volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time; volume 3 of The Churchill War Papers, edited by Martin Gilbert; Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a big bestseller; about half a dozen novels by James Lee Burke in paperback; and a guide to Cairo, Alexandria, and the Nile.)
Nevertheless, as we shall see, a snobbish or elitist attitude toward the bestseller list is as unjustified as a slavish devotion to it. Many of the books I enjoy most have been big bestsellers in their time, including, for example, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which is, along with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (also a bestseller), one of the books I often reread. Not every book on the bestseller list is exploitive, or trashy, or propelled there by Oprah. When one looks over the bestseller lists of the past hundred years, it is amazing how many good books are there, and how many of them have survived over the decades. Of course there are also a good many clunkers, fad diet books that have long since been made obsolete by new fad diets, “as told to” autobiographies by celebrities whose luster has grown dim, and so on, but that’s the point -- the bestseller list, from day one, has always represented a reliable mixture of the good and the bad, of quality and trash, of literature for the ages and self-improvement schemes that now seem merely weird to the extent they’re remembered at all. (Who still remembers Dr. Coué or “primal scream therapy” or “winning through intimidation”? Is there anybody out there still taking safflower seed oil capsules to lose weight, as recommended in Calories Don’t Count?)
The bestseller list, in fact, presents us with a kind of corrective reality. It tells us what we’re actually reading (or, at least, what we’re actually buying) as opposed to what we think we ought to be reading, or would like other people to believe we’re buying. Like stepping on the scales, it tells us the truth, however unflattering, and is therefore, taken over the long haul, a pretty good way of assessing our culture and of judging how, if any, we have changed.
About the Creator
Michael Korda is the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, as well as the author of Country Matters, Charmed Lives, Another Life, Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer, and the number one bestseller Power! He has also written several best-selling novels, including Queenie, The Fortune, and The Immortals. He lives with his wife, Margaret, in Dutchess County, New York.
