11.0628 Re: 20th-century American Bestsellers

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Mon, 9 Mar 1998 22:16:22 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 628.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

Date: Thu, 05 Mar 1998 16:33:21 -0500
From: John Unsworth <jmu2m@virginia.edu>
Subject: 11.0620 Re: 20th-century American Bestsellers (an invitation)

At 08:58 PM 3/5/98 +0000, you wrote:

>How arre these "best-sellers" determined? I have a cache of
>turn-of-the-century paperbacks that my great-grandmother read, together
>with a similar cache of more serious hard-bound volumes read by my
>great-grandfather, and they are VERY different in tone, content, and
>(probably) conventional "value". Only one of the items from my
>great-grandfather's list (another novel by Dixon) was on the bestseller
>list posted here.

The best-seller lists I used are the Publisher's Weekly/Bowker's Annual
lists, provided by Cader Books. The lists are browsable by decade from
my course site, and cover 1900-1994.

John

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