Books: HitParade: 1895-1945

FIFTY YEARS OF BESTSELLERS, 1895-1945_///ce Payne Hacketf—R. R. Bowker ($3).

Turkish corners were the rage; puff-sleeved, pompadoured pinups from the pen of Charles Dana Gibson blossomed on college study walls; bicycling scorchers menaced pedestrians; and rural free delivery was about to be established by law. The year was 1895. The same year, the late, great, tragic scholar and editor Harry Thurston Peck (Twenty Years of the Republic) began publishing in the Bookman the first U.S. best-seller lists, compiled on the basis of sales in the nation’s 30 or 40 leading bookstores.

Readers that year were flocking to buy a bucolic novel about the Scottish village of Drumtochty by Ian Maclaren and a nostalgic romance of Paris’ Latin Quarter by a British illustrator named George du Maurier. Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and Trilby became the first “bestsellers” —a new word in the language.

From 50 annual lists published by the Bookman, by Books of the Month (now Bowker Book Guides), and by her own Publishers’ Weekly, Associate Editor Alice Payne Hackett has compiled a record of U.S. literary taste from 1895 to the present. Titles like Charles Major’s When Knighthood Was in Flower. (1899), John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1925) awake as many memories as old tunes. Winston Churchill was a name on everybody’s lips in the first years of the century. It meant not a British statesman but a U.S. author (no kin) whose historical novels of early America (Richard Carvel, The Crisis, etc.) were best-sellers in 1901, ’04, ’06, ’08 and ’13.

No Rhyme or Reason. Authors and publishers will be hard put to it to find from this volume why these best-sellers were bestsellers. The Bible remains the champion best-seller of all times, but its closest U.S. competitor is Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller, a textbook first published in 1790 which has sold more than 100 million copies.

At the top of a list of cumulative bestsellers over the years from 1880 to the present is In His Steps, a pious novel by the Rev. Charles Monroe Sheldon describing a community which followed the teachings of Jesus literally. It has sold more than 8,000,000 copies. Close behind, in this order, are Scrapbookster Elbert Hubbard’s Message to Garcia (4,000,000), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (3,625,000), Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People (2,751,000), Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (2,500,000), and Marion Hargrove’s See Here, Private Hargrove (2,500,000). Farther down the list are Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Bob Hope’s / Never Left Home, with around a million and a half sales each. Anthony Adverse and Edith M. Hull’s The Sheik have each sold some 1,190,000 copies. Quo Vadis and the nostalgic travelogue Our Hearts Were Young and Gay also run neck & neck. And Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills is tied at 1,200,000 with H. G. Wells’s Outline of History.

Fads & Phases. Non-fiction was notably unpopular during the years between 1895 and 1911. Only with the publication of Wells’s Outline in 1921 did factual books of general or topical interest begin to rival romance and adventure. But topicality, whether in fact or fiction, has proved no more certain an index to popularity than literary merit. With its sensational expose of the “meat trust” in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle created a furore worthy of Zola and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. But on the year’s best-seller list it was handily topped by the newest novels of three perennial favorites, Winston Churchill, Owen Wister (Lady Baltimore), and Robert W. Chambers (The Fighting Chance).

Best-sellers have sometimes ridden the crest of a fad, sometimes have been the stone that set the avalanche in motion. Linen dusters fluttered along U.S. highways in 1905, and in their back draft C.N. and A.M. Williamson, specialists in vapid romances of the open road, whose heroines invariably fell for their chauffeurs (all princes in disguise), were swept on to the best-seller list with their The Princess Passes. In 1923 a slim volume with a top-heavy title, Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, had Americans everywhere murmuring, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.”

War Books. By all odds the most popular war book ever written was the bitter and disillusioned All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German ex-soldier Erich Maria Remarque. It appeared in 1929, just halfway between two wars, and has sold more than 3,000,000 copies in 27 languages.

World War I brought forth a spate of topical books. The best-seller of 1917 was H. G. Wells’s novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through, which described the effect of two years of war on a literary Briton who lost his son. Robert W. Service’s Rhymes of a Red Cross Man became one of the rare volumes of poetry to make the list. Mary Green’s cookbook, Better Meals for Less Money, designed for shortage-harried housewives, brought Author Green considerably more money. But by the end of 1918 the U.S. public had tired of both war and “hooverizing” and was hungrily gulping the cactus and sage-scented paragraphs of Zane Grey’s The U.P. Trail.

In recent years the backing of big subscription clubs like the Book-of-the-Month Club has insured the success of many books. High-pressure promotion campaigns have launched others, including last year’s lusty sensation, Forever Amber. An obscure novel called The Honorable Peter Stirling started selling like wildfire in 1897 when rumor identified the chief character as President Cleveland. Alexander Woollcott boosted a short story about a retiring British schoolteacher called Goodbye, Mr. Chips out of the cloistered covers of the Atlantic Monthly and into the hurly-burly of best-sellerdom by announcing over the radio that it had sent him “quietly mad.” But Americans, by & large, have read what they felt like reading, neglected many a worthy or highly touted volume. The only thing that U.S. best-sellers indisputably have in common is sales.