Book Review: Making the List

Michael Korda, Making the List: a Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999: as Seen Through the Annual Bestseller Lists of Publishers Weekly. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2001. ISBN: 0760725594. 

Genre: books and reading

Subgenre: cultural history, United States, Americana

Format: hardcover

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College

 

This book is a cultural history of the United States and its reading choices and habits. It is based on the bestseller lists of The Bookman (1900-1912) and then from Publishers Weekly (1912-1999). The author was a former editor at Simon and Schuster, a fact he often refers to throughout the book often to remark on a famous author on the lists he may have published or that he may have missed publishing. 

The book is arranged into an introduction, ten chapters, and an epilogue. Each chapter covers a decade starting in 1900 and ending in 1999. The epilogue wraps it up as the 1990s come to an end. 

The book blends facts and a bit of literary history with anecdotes and some trivia. We can learn a lot about American reading habits, interests, and desires from what they read, or at least what they are buying to read. You can even see how reading tastes change over time, and how some reading tastes come and go in cycles. At the end of each chapter you get the bestseller lists by year. Initially, the lists were just fiction, but by the mid-1910's, we get fiction and nonfiction. 

For bibliophiles, this can be an interesting book to learn about reader habits over time in the United States. Along the way we see trends including the rise and fall of chain bookstores, then the giant box bookstores, and the Amazon behemoth on the horizon. In 1999, it was still some time before Amazon became the monster it is now. 

The text is fairly straightforward. It's mostly a presentation of facts and analysis with some anecdotes. Interesting at times but not terribly compelling. This is a book more for bibliophiles and librarians, and also for folks who enjoy trivia. I found it interesting to see the many books that were bestsellers once that are now gone and forgotten, gone out of print even. As the lists get into the later decades, I found one or two books I've read. Yet overall I am reminded I don't read much based on bestseller lists, or at least based on the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. 

I liked the book as for me it was an easy read. The chapters are not long, so you can pick the book up, read a chapter here or there, and you're done with the book before you know it. If you like reading about books and reading culture, with an American focus, this may be for you. 

3 out of 5 stars. 

Additional reading notes: 

What the bestseller lists tell us, according to the author: 

"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" (x). 

Though he argues also that not everything on the list is pushed by Oprah, Oprah does push a lot of stuff into bestseller lists. That aside the author's observation seems quaint in an era where bestseller lists in various places are rigged or "gamed" such as Amazon's lists or PACs buying politician books in droves to make sales look better and to hand out as favors in fundraisers, etc. (here is one example). Overall, the focus on bookstore sales also seems a bit quaint, again, due to Amazon's excessive influence as well as other online outlets, though Amazon remains dominant. 

These days we take bestseller lists and other ranking lists like Top Ten for various topics for granted, but that was not always the case: 

"We score everything and everyone, but when the top ten books were first listed by sales in 1895, it was a startling innovation in retailing, though it did not immediately catch on" (xvi).