Customer Reviews

Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999

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Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, has collected lists of the bestselling books (fiction and non-fiction) for the entire 20th Century. He writes an essay leading into each decade's lists. His primary observation is that Americans read the same basic books over and over. For example, historical fiction dealing with the Civil War appears on the list via Winston Churchill (a Southern author, not the great British leader) in "The Crisis" in 1901; Margaret Mitchell, of course, made the list in 1936 and 1937 with "Gone With the Wind"; and in 1997, Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" rose to #2. Romantic novels, medical-themed novels, spiritually-themed novels, bodice-ripping novels (more and more explicit as the century advanced) all make continual reappearances. Books sell more and more despite the coming of the radio, then of movies, then of television, and then of the computer and the internet.

It is great fun for a reader to peruse the lists, remembering books read and books-meant-to-be-read. I was born in 1948 so the books and authors from the second half of the century are pretty familiar. For no good reason I've decided to read the nine bestsellers from my birthyear that I hadn't read. (Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" is easily the most prominent and I read it several years ago.) It will take some looking to find them, much less read them; but, it seems a silly, provocative task to undertake.

Every reader will get something different from "Making the List" and therin lies the fun!

Michael Korda is not sanguine on the turn best-seller book publishing took in the 1990s. "At the end of the day,"Korda writes " the bestseller lists of the nineties made for relatively depressing reading, except to accountants. In fiction it became enormously difficult to break through the sheer weight of numbers generated by perhaps two dozen. or fewer, top writers who virtually dominated the list, and in nonfiction. a range of celebrities , merchandise, and self-help books that made it equally hard for all but the most exceptional book to get to the list."
You will learn much about the publishing and bookselling industries-- as well as America's reading habits for the past 100 years -from this delightfully candid and witty work.. I admire many of Korda's books,- the thirteen that he's written (eight nonfiction, five novels) and more than a few of the hundreds that he's edited. (And this I can prove.! I spent seven years of my own life writing a biography of one of his famous authors.) However with all that Korda-(possessor of unsinkable intellect and energy, even in the face of prostate cancer-) has previously contributed to our insider knowledge of books and publishing , MAKING THE LIST is his most indispensable work. You might not think so at first because it is short and so much fun to read, but the distilled knowledge, observations and insights of his long career (which began in 1958) may leave you with (a) an enriched understanding of the relative place in the world of some of your favorite books and authors, (b) a savvy historic view of where modern publishing came from , and where it may or may not be going., (c)comprehension of those historic periods (by decade) which resemble one another culturally, and those which clash. ( For example, hot sex is pretty much gone from mainstream commercial novels right now. In this regard today's fiction could be at home in 1895, when the first list was started, and vice versa...) With Korda as your guide you will learn how the parameters of best-sellerdom rise and fall...and rise.: as the only editor with the distinction of having himself written a number one hardcover bestseller
(on the annual bestseller list of Publishers Weekly) Korda reveals that this book ,POWER! ,earned its top spot with a net sale around 200,000 ,after returns, although there were 350,000 in print. Today the top nonfiction title would sell at least three or four times that amount.... In some eras nonfiction sold more than fiction, but nowadays (in case you haven't noticed) the brand name new-title-every -year novelists virtually have a "lockhold "on the list, often achieving hardcover sales in the millions....Thirty or forty years ago it was expected that the hardcover book business was almost terminal- except for libraries. Today, many books sell more in hardcover than in paperback. The price differential is small enough that readers don't want to wait.
Korda closes MAKING THE LIST with the observation that the bestseller list defines what Americans are reading: "Like a mirror, it reflects who we are what we want, what interests us, and what we really want to know....and the longer we look into it, the more we clearly see--OURSELVES." This belief may explain why Korda muses so sadly and regretfully at the lack of originality, intellect and art on recent lists.

I would urge him to cheer up, and remind him that.some of the most influential books of the 20th century fell below the radar of the top ten or (later) top fifteen biggest sellers of an entire year., even though many enjoyed a good run on the easier-to-crack weekly lists. As a feminist, I couldn't help but notice that in the 1960s and '70s - at its height - my revolution didn't make it to the annual lists. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Susan Brownmiller etc etc. - those whose transformative books changed every woman's life -did not sell nearly as many books as , for example, EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK or THE SENSUOUS WOMAN by the mysterious "J." But Friedan et al were read widely and deeply enough to light women's pilots all over the world. Again, in the early 90s, when feminism was declared dead ,Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Anita Hill, Naomi Wolf and others dramatically reawakened interest with their popular and widely debated works. But neither did they make it to the Publishers Weekly annual lists. even though as Steinem travelled around the country promoting REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN her admirers rose at dawn and waited for hours on lines that were many city blocks in length.

Maybe one day Korda will give us a sequel to MAKING THE LIST called MAKING TROUBLE. In the meantime everyone who loves books and reading (or writing) is urged to check out MAKING THE LIST.

Mr. Michael Korda is the perfect person to write this book. He brings to the project an enormous sense of perspective from his many decades as an editor at Simon & Schuster, having had two books (Power! and Queenie) on the best seller list, being a book lover, and having a great story telling talent. The experience is like having a pleasant discussion over fine wine and aged cheese in a beautiful country home with a beautifully flickering fire in the background.

Today's best seller list began with surveys by Harry Thurston Peck in 1895. Mr. Korda's book then captures almost the entire history of best sellers in the United States. The lists for 1900-1912 come from The Bookman and from Publishers Weekly for 1912-1999. During the earliest years, there is only a fiction list. Later on, the list divides into at least fiction and non-fiction and sometimes includes special lists (such as during war years on war topics).

Most of the book is contained in ten chapters that each cover a decade. An essay captures the main themes in writing, popular taste, publishing, retailing, technology (if any) and the legal environment. Along the way, Mr. Korda sprinkles in factoids that sharpen up the appeal of the material. For example, the popular author Winston Churchill in the early part of the 20th century did not later become the prime minister of Great Britain. In certain years, he can tell you how many books had to be sold to make number one on the list. Further, he provides a sense of perspective in pointing out minor and major taste trends along the way. For instance, sex was only hinted at until after World War II. By 1999, it had almost disappeared again from best sellers after temporarily having been a centerpiece in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was impressed both by how many great books that I have enjoyed were actually best sellers, and how many books that were best sellers I have never heard of.

At the end of each decade is a year-by-year best seller list. Reading through those felt like stepping into a warm Jacuzzi as the warm memories of books I have loved flooded back over my mind. It was almost visceral. I could feel myself becoming young again, and then aging to the current day. If you are like me, the book is worth it just for the great nostalgia you will enjoy.

I have put together a brief list of best sellers by decade that may surprise you:

1900-1909: The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Virginian; Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms; The Pit; The Jungle.

1910-1919: The Montessori Method; The Education of Henry Adams; Penrod; Seventeen; Pollyanna.

1920-1929: Outline of History; Emily Post's Etiquette; The Story of Philosophy; The Bridge of San Luis Rey; All Quiet on the Western Front; Ripley's Believe It or Not.

1930-1939: Of Time and the River; Of Mice and Men; Grapes of Wrath; Mein Kampf; Life with Father; How to Win Friends and Influence People.

1940-1949: A Bell for Adano; Yankee from Olympus; The Greatest Story Ever Told; Berlin Diary.

1950-1959: Andersonville; The Old Man and the Sea; Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book; Kon-Tiki; The Sea Around Us; Revised Standard Edition of the Bible; Power of Positive Thinking; Why Johnny Can't Read; Eloise; Atlas Shrugged; Kids Say the Darndest Things!; Masters of Deceit; The Ugly American.

1960-1969: Franny & Zooey; The Shoes of the Fisherman; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Profiles in Courage; In Cold Blood.

1970-1979: Sophie's Choice; Roots; Ragtime; The Thorn Birds.

1980-1989: In Search of Excellence; The One Minute Manager; Megatrends; Iaccoca; The Mammoth Hunters.

1990-1999: Annually dominated by John Grisham for most of the decade.

What's the weakness then of the book? Well, for all of its charm, the cultural perspective is a mile wide and a few centimeters thick. So, although the book certainly hits its target, to give us "a look at who we are, seen through what we read," you will probably not learn too much that you did not know already. The main lesson for me is that the public taste is better than I would have thought. Many fine books did sell well.

Serious students of cultural history will find raw material here for further consideration, but not much analysis.

If you are like me, you enjoy seeing other peoples' libraries. What lessons do you draw from the reading tastes of Americans over the last century? How might those tastes change for the better or worse in the future?

May you always find books that excite and inspire you!

This is not a book that lends itself to a good audio recording. Listening to the "text" portions of the books was fine - very enjoyable and very informative - however, it is impossible to listen to the lists of published books without getting bored. I ended up fast forwarding through the book lists and probably missed some of the text as well.

Yes, I recommend this book - but read it - don't listen to it.

Michael Korda's easy and agreeable style is the heart and soul of this very pretty and interesting recollection of one hundred years of book biz top dogs. Korda, who is intimately connected with the list, having been there both as a writer (nonfiction: Power! How to Get It, How to Use It (1975) and a novel from 1985: Queenie) and as an editor with Simon & Schuster (Jacqueline Susann The Love Machine, and others, including books by Irving Wallace, Richard M. Nixon and Carlos Castaneda), presents the lists from Publisher's Weekly by decade. He introduces each decade with a modest essay, focusing on some of the books and authors, and--most characteristically--noting trends and how the business has changed from decade to decade. The prose flows as smooth as graphite (I read the book in a single setting) partly because Korda is a very good writer and partly because the type is double-spaced throughout (which I think might represent a trend he does not mention, namely that of publishing attractive hard cover books with fewer words per page).

Originally just the top ten fiction titles appeared on PW's list. It is only in recent decades that both the top 15 fiction and the top 15 nonfiction titles appear. Nonetheless, perusing these lists really does, as Korda asserts, provide a kind of insight into the American psyche and how it has changed over the last hundred years--or, more saliently, how it hasn't. Korda identifies cyclical trends, with, for example, the popularity of the women's novel, ebbing and flowing, as has the historical romance. And in nonfiction Korda identifies the nearly constant popularity of self-help books, especially diet books and cook books. He chronicles the liberalization of sexuality from a Victorian prudishness in the early part of the century to an easing in the forties signaled by the "bodice ripper" Forever Amber (1944) by Kathleen Winsor to Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious to Nabokov's Lolita (1958) to D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1959) to Henry Miller and beyond.

Korda also traces the changes in the business practices, beginning in the Depression when publishers first allowed book stores to return unsold copies, a practice thought to be temporary that became institutionalized. Later came the book clubs and the chain stores and the mass marketing and the death of the small book shop, and finally the Internet (which Korda mentions briefly in the Epilogue). Along the way there was an evolution away from the care and cultivation of promising authors to blockbuster promotion and the care and feeding of bestselling authors who could put a new one up every year, until by the eighties most of the fiction bestsellers were by authors who had been there before. On the nonfiction list the trend was to books by celebrity authors, retired US presidents, show biz people, the Duchess of York, mavens of industry (e.g., Lee Iacocca and Bill Gates), generals (Yeager and Schwarzkopf) even the Pope and the Dali Lama.

But it would be a mistake, at least from my point of view, to put too much stock in the bestseller list as a mirror to the American psyche. As Korda points out on page 77, the list doesn't include tabulations of mass-market books, which in the beginning were not even sold in bookstores, but in liquor stores and drugstores. Perhaps these titles would have revealed our hopes, dreams and fears better than the titles on the hard cover lists. Also increasingly the list became a self-creation of the big publishers who put their money into promoting books that they believed warranted the outlay, an increasingly narrow list of popular, mass-market novels and sure-fire self help books and celebrity tell-alls. By the late sixties, it is my belief that the real psyche of America as reflected in its book-buying habits could only be discerned by looking further down the list. By the eighties the bestseller lists reflected the mentality of the big corporate publishing houses and their merchandising schemes while the entire universe of production from the academic presses, and the middle and the small houses is not represented at all.

I would like to note too that the best writing being done today is by writers who do not appear on the best seller list. One might say, wasn't it ever thus? but in truth there was a time before the blockbuster complex that works of literature regularly made the list. One only has to recall Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and even Virginia Woolf from the thirties, and John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, and John O'Hara from the forties to realize that something has changed. What we have now on the bestseller fiction list, at any rate, are almost exclusively entertainments for the mass mind and not an Edith Wharton (#4 in 1921 with The Age of Innocence) nor a Thornton Wilder (#1 in 1928 with The Bridge of San Luis Rey) in sight.

Regardless, for anyone interested in bestseller phenomena, Korda's book will make for an absorbing and informative read.

I just came across this book a couple of days ago at my local 'big box bookstore'.I enjoy 'books about books'and this one certainly falls into that category.I have never paid much attention to bestseller lists for a couple of reasons.First,I tend to read mainly non fiction.I have found the fiction writers I enjoy,and except for Steinbeck,Twain and one or two others, are not on the bestseller lists.So,of all the fiction out there,new and old,I find so much to read that I don't need a list to tell me what is a bestseller and must be read.Although I have read several of the best seller writers,I haven't been enthused enough to read all their stuff;Larry McMurtry being the exception.I guess he falls into the one a year bestsellers;
but even some of his are getting to feel like publish or perish books.To me, it seems that with most artists their early stuff is the best.I find that so with Steinbeck,Erskine Caldwell,McMurtry and most of my favorite writers.
Merle Haggard once stated that his earlier work was his best because he lived the experiences then but not any longer.I find the same with authors.
I found this book very good in that it demonstrates that best seller lists are something created and pushed by the book publishing and selling industry,and for their interests and not necessarily the buyers and readers of their products.In other words,it is primarily a marketing tool,and while probably very useful to them,not particularyy for the reader who finds his own treasures to read;and doesn't just read to follow what is being pushed in the media.
The book business has had a very rough ride in the last several years and has tended to play catch up or as often said,"lead the parade from the rear."This is very evident from reading this book.The customer (reader)will decide what to read not the marketeer.No matter how much the establishment tries to push their preference it doesn't change anything.
A couple of statements in the book are very telling:
"the bestseller list began to resemble a club that was hard to break into" pg.172
"Do you guys realize how much money the company would make if you only published bestsellers?" pg.173
""a publishing house that plays it safe,even if it satisfies
it's corporate parent,will sooner or later collapse." pg.197
"the bestseller lists of the nineties made for relatively depressing reading,except to accountants." pg.199
"In 1990,for example,the fiction list for the year contained not a single newcomer-all fifteen who made it were established,familiar bestselling writers,most of them on a yearly basis.It was,if you like,the triumph of brand-name merchandizing applied to books." pg.196. In other words the lazy approach.
A great read to see what bestseller lists are all about.

It was on May 22, 1946, that I finished reading and enjoying Fifty Years of Best Sellers 1895-1945, by Alice Payne Hackett. So when I saw this book I thought it would be fun to read, and it is. The author incivisvely comments on the best seller lists during the 20th century, and of course it is fun to see which books one read were best sellers. I was surprised to see that I had read 101 books which were number 1 best sellers in a year, either in fiction or non-fiction. This surprised me since I do not use, or at least I have not for many years, the best seller list to decide what to read. It is also interesting to see which great books never made the list. For instance, The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, I have thought an outstanding book ever since I read it back in 1981, and it won a Pulitzer Prize, but never made a year best seller list! If nothing else, this book will open your eyes to how much poor choosing some people do when they decide to buy a book...

Making The List does jut what its title suggests; it takes the best seller list since the early 1900 up until 1999 and analyzes them in order to make meaning out of the tendencies and the reocurrences.

The analysis itself is only slightly above average as Korda mostly only states the obvious. The real reason to get this book is to be able to analyze each list by yourself. Some books on those lists I've never heard of, others are still very well present today (Rebecca, Old Man And The Sea...). And some of the tendencies are quite strange; during the 60s, the biggest best selling novel was in fact The Bible. And it's quite frightening to see how unorignal the lists for the 90s were; only the names like King, Clancy, Steele, Clark, Cussler and Grisham seem to appear on those lists.

I really enjoyed going through this book. It's brief, straight to the point and very concise. A great piece of literary history!

"Making The List", is an interesting book that piques the reader's interest rather than satisfying it. This 10-chapter book contains 195 pages, and more than half, 100 pages, are just the lists of the best-selling books for a given year.

Michael Korda provides informative, witty, and at times sharp edged commentary for the 10 decades of books that he comments upon. The analysis he offers is uneven, although it greatly improves once his observations originate during his tenure as a publisher. I have always wondered just how many books need to be sold to make the annual list. He does provide numbers occasionally, but they are the exception not the rule. Some of his remarks are readily apparent to readers who pay attention to the names of authors that routinely appear year after year. Being told that a short roster of names have virtually locked up the annual lists for almost 20 is not news.

Korda takes a potentially fascinating topic-an analysis of American bestseller lists in the 20th century-and gets in the way of his subject. He's desperate to remind readers of his own long-forgotten books and otherwise allows his prejudices to intrude far too much in the discussion. A more analytical, thoughtful and less subjective and breezy approach would have made for a much better book resulting in a four or five-star rating, rather than just two.