Books: Old Favorites

Best-seller lists are compiled each week by the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and The Publishers’ Weekly. They give a clear picture of U. S. week-to-week buying of new books. But do they give an accurate indication of U. S. literary taste? Librarians (who hold that Mark Twain is still the most widely-read U. S. author) aver that they do not. Publishers of inexpensive reprints are inclined to agree with the librarians. Releasing figures last fortnight on the sale of his Modern Library series (95¢ and $1.25), Publisher Bennett Cerf disclosed that Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is the most popular of the Modern Library’s 257 titles, has sold 120,000 copies in ten years; that Of Human Bondage and Candide sell widely enough each year to crowd all but the most popular new books. Most surprising figure revealed by Publisher Cerf: in four years a two-volume set of Gibbon’s 150-year-old Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has sold 50,000 copies, is still going strong.