The Great Paper Chase

Future historians may well call this the era of Follow the Leader. Despite the devotion our society pays, so noisily and incessantly, to the New, the Better, the Different, most people move gleefully along with the great parade, buying, seeing, doing much what all their neighbors buy, see and do. It has become a Madison Avenue truism that the popularity of a product is a virtue in itself, apart from and more enticing than usefulness or sturdiness or attractiveness. We are, in fact, a generation that equates popularity with quality. We watch top-rated TV shows because they are top-rated. We consider a play worth seeing only if a ticket for it is difficult to get. And we buy books because they are on the best-seller lists.

This last symptom of America's love affair with popularity is more alarming than most. The best-seller lists, presumably designed simply to indicate what the public is reading, have become the single most effective means of determining what the public will read. The presence of a book among the 30 or so titles that, according to the ads, All America is reading, is a guarantee to the author and publisher that it will make money for them. All over the country, they can rest assured, people will be picking up copies of a book which they know little about except that lots of other people have picked it up. All perfectly harmless and in the best tradition of American free enterprise. Or is it?

Well, maybe it would be if books were toothpaste, but in this particular case we are dealing with ideas, not with dentifrice. Book lists are invidious at best -- and in practice their best is none too good. The most cursory investigation of the methods by which the major lists are concocted shows a startlingly wide margin for error, dishonesty and outright fraud.

The best-seller list, as we know it, is a fairly recent innovation. Although the first compilation of book sales in America was published by The Bookman, a trade paper, in 1885, it was designed as a service for booksellers and was hardly more than an educated guess as to what was selling, would sell or might sell. By 1905, the words "Best Seller" were common enough to be included in a revised edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. But it wasn't until the Twenties that publishers recognized the value of the phrase as a stimulant to sales, and headlines hailing That exciting new best seller began to appear whenever books were advertised.

From its modest beginnings, the best-seller list has today become a pivotal fact of publishing life. Although literary prizes and critical accolades invariably go to works that have trouble selling enough copies to break even, in most people's minds a book that doesn't qualify as a best seller might just as well not exist.

About 55 national best-seller lists are now issued in this country, and glancing through a pile of them on any given week can be a diverting pastime -- they so often bear so little relationship to one another. Two are generally credited with being the most important, most respected and most accurate of the lot. These widely revered lists are published in the Sunday book supplements of The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. What exactly do they measure? Is it possible, as has been rumored, that the reports on which they (and most of the others) are based may be, to put it mildly, frequently misleading?

The New York Times list, first published on August 9, 1942, employs a staff of (continued on page 96) Great Paper Chase (continued from page 94) stringers who each week ask 180 retail booksellers in 36 cities around the country for their five best-selling fiction and nonfiction titles -- just the titles, not the number of copies sold. This information, collected in person or by phone, is wired back to New York, where a "qualitative analysis" is made of the raw data. A book that has been listed by a store as its number one choice is given five points. Second choice gets four; third, three; and so on. The point scores from booksellers in large cities are set down on one of two master sheets. On the other sheet are inscribed the scores from smaller cities and towns.

After the master sheets are completed, a piece of rather peculiar arithmetic is performed. The scores for the large cities are doubled in an attempt to make up for the fact that the number one book in a small-town store may have sold only 10 copies, while a book listed fourth in a large city may have sold several hundred. One need not be a statistician to see that this is an extremely rough attempt at figure-weighting.

Charles Scupine, who supervises the compiling of the Times list, makes no claim to absolute accuracy. He admits that frequently individual stringers do not report in and that on some weeks large areas of the country are not canvassed. But the purpose of the list, he adds, is merely to show trends. Over the course of a year, he contends, it is representative and self-corrective. He has complete faith in the accuracy and honesty of his stringers and the reporting booksellers.

The New York Times Book Review, it must be noted in all fairness, does make a gesture toward nonconformity each week by adding, directly beneath its Best Seller List, a few nonbest-selling titles, which, say the editors, have been selected for their "particular literary, topical or scholarly interest."

The system used to make up the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday book list, What People Are Reading, varies considerably from the Times system, and it is not unusual for a book to ride one of the lists for several weeks without ever making the other. One week last summer, for example, the Times had Wallace Stegner's A Shooting Star in ninth place and Evan Hunter's Mothers and Daughters in 10th place in a list of 16. Neither book made the Herald Tribune's What People Are Reading list that week.

The Herald Tribune established its What People Are Reading department on October 16, 1933. At first, it was intended to be primarily a promotion device for the book supplement in which it appears, and which is sold separately from the newspaper outside New York City. The Tribune chose 75 bookstores around the country to aid in compiling its list. Starting in the early Forties, a store had to sell at least 100 copies of the Tribune book section every week to qualify as a reporting store. If it failed to meet its quota in any given week, it was replaced by another store that was merchandising the supplement more successfully. Wags suggested that the feature's name should be changed to What People Are Reading in Bookstores That Sold 100 Copies of the Herald Tribune Book Section This Week, and the 100-copy requirement was soon discarded. Although retailers are still supplied with supplements to be put on sale, they no longer have to sell a set number of copies.

There are, currently, 57 dealers reporting to the Tribune every week. New ones are added and old ones are dropped periodically. Each of them is supplied with a batch of postcards on which he is supposed to note his six best-selling fiction and nonfiction titles. He is not asked to set them down in order of sales -- just the titles. Thus, a book listed sixth by a store carries as much weight as a book listed first. In the final tabulations the book that has been included on the most lists from the most stores becomes the number one best seller. Any title sent in by at least three stores automatically makes the list.

The loopholes in the Herald Tribune's system are obvious. Nobody contacts the stores personally, as do the Times stringers. Dealers sometimes let weeks go by without reporting in, and thus whole sections of the country may be ignored in the survey for considerable periods. In one listing chosen at random, for example, no stores reported from such important book centers as Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Kansas City. The Tribune survey for August 27, 1961, did not include bookstores in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago has been considered for many years by publishers to be one of the best markets in America for fiction, and its omission is a very sizable one, indeed, for a list that purports to tell what people are reading across the country.

Even dealers who do remember to send in their postcards have a way of getting careless about it. One bookseller who is frequently represented on the Herald Tribune's list says that in his store, and in at least six other reporting stores that he knows of, any book that sells 12 copies is bound to make the dealers' lists. In other words, if you bought 12 copies of a book in his store and 12 copies each in two of the other stores he mentioned, that book would be named on three postcards, and would automatically qualify as What People Are Reading. It is thus possible, theoretically if absurdly, to have a certified best seller that has sold a grand total of 36 copies.

There is another important difference between the Times and Tribune lists. The stores that the Times stringers contact are, as far as the general public is concerned, anonymous. The Herald Tribune, on the other hand, lists the reporting stores along with the best sellers themselves. This, in the view of many observers in the book trade, leaves the door open to larceny.

Some years ago Variety reported that a motion picture company had been approached by a public relations man who offered, for a nominal fee (nominal to a PR man, that is), to put any book on the best-seller lists. The fact that this feat was possible was no secret in the book field. As one knowledgeable observer puts it, "It would be a cinch. By buying 100 copies of a book in selected stores around the country, anyone can influence the reports."

A few years ago, Hollywood purchased the motion picture rights to a best-selling novel called Not As a Stranger. When the book seemed about to slip off the best-seller lists into oblivion, a curious thing happened: It began moving up again. Investigation disclosed that, oddly enough, it was selling only in certain stores, in certain cities -- stores that reported to the Times and Tribune.

Aware that the lists are susceptible to outside influence, a well-known novelist is reported to have developed a profitable sales-spurring gambit of his own. He arranges his extensive lecture schedule so that he appears only in cities that report regularly to either the Times or the Herald Tribune, and autographs only books purchased at reporting stores. (He insists on seeing the sales slip before he sets pen to flyleaf.) This writer now has six best sellers to his credit.

Publishers have developed many "sales aids" designed to encourage dealers to stock up on a given title, display it with enthusiasm, extol it to customers and, hopefully, mention it when the stringer calls or note it on the postcard. The most attractive promise a publisher can give a bookseller is that a title will be backed by a big advertising campaign. The dealer may be offered one book free for every 10 purchased, as an inducement to stock up.

Movie companies and publishers of pocket books have been known to pay handsome sums earmarked for promoting a given book so that when it reaches the screen and/or newsstand it can be advertised as That Beloved best Seller. Occasionally, these promoters participate even more directly in the manufacture (continued on page 150) Great Paper Chase (continued from page 96) facture of what they consider will be a popular novel. For example, Dell Books paid $265,000 for the sequel to Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, simply to induce its appearance. A high price for inspiration -- but it paid for itself in national publicity. All in all, no one who has observed the mass-market media's impact on the book business will quarrel with the statement by Jerry Wald Productions (which sweetened Dell's kitty by an undisclosed amount) that "The motion picture industry may certainly accept a modest accolade for its share in popularizing best sellers ..."

Sometimes booksellers will succumb to the temptation to list a book as a best seller because it is exactly the opposite. A retailer may have loaded up on a particular title which, on the basis of advance expectations, should have sold very well. Finding himself with unforeseen stacks of unsold books on his hands, he is sorely tempted to include the lagging title in his next report in hopes that it will find its way onto the list. In the trade, these books are called "best buyers" rather than best sellers. I have been told, confidentially, that such was the case with the recent John Steinbeck novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. On the basis of Steinbeck's reputation and previous sales figures, bookstores loaded up with the expectation of having an assured best seller. The Winter of Our Discontent, however, one of Mr. Steinbeck's lesser works, was received coolly by critics across the country. Despite its lagging sales, book dealers reported the title to both the Times and Tribune, in the hope that a position on the lists would move the stock.

Even if promotional gimmicks were held to a minimum, however, the basic weaknesses of the system would remain. Most bookstores do not have the kind of complex inventory setup that can tell them precisely how many copies of a given title are sold during a given week. Similarly, publishers' sales figures cannot be depended on because they do not really represent final retail sales.

The manager of one of the largest bookstores in the world says frankly that he uses "the rule of back" in reporting to both the Times and Tribune. "If I tried to keep an accurate, authentic, up-to-date record of sales on individual titles I'd be out of business in a week," he explains. "It's just too expensive and time-consuming. I'll tell you how I work it. I judge the popularity of a book by the number of copies I have to drag up from the stockroom in the basement. If the twinge in my spine reminds me that I dragged up an exceptionally large number of a certain book, I include that book in my weekly report."

In addition to the statistical inadequacies, a variety of unpredictable personal factors weighs heavily on the best-seller reports. Bookdealers admit that they frequently send in a "culture" vote. They will include in their report a worthy volume that is not selling very well, but seems to them to merit a boost. Also, a high-minded dealer may ignore a runaway best seller of dubious literary value if he feels it reflects unpleasantly on his store and its clientele.

This was the fate, quite recently, of a slim volume of scatological poetry called Poems for the John, written by a nightclub comedian named Jackie Kannon. It was turned down by publisher after publisher, and Kannon eventually formed his own company (KanRom) and published it himself. Bookstores refused to stock it; The New York Times, the Herald Tribune and several national magazines refused to carry his advertising. Kannon, working assorted major night clubs across the country, devoted a portion of his act to plugging the book and reading excerpts from it. Stocked initially by cigar stores, stationery stores and the kind of specialty shops that feature itching powder and dribble glasses, the book has had a phenomenal sale -- selling, by Kannon's possibly enthusiastic estimate, in excess of 250,000 copies. One small stationery store on Madison Avenue reportedly sold 2200 copies in a single week. As a result of this success and a healthy boost from Dorothy Kilgallen's column, Brentano's and other major bookstores across the country began stocking the book. Its phenomenal sale continued in these stores, many of which reported in regularly to The New York Times and the Herald Tribune. Very few of them, if any, ever mentioned Poems for the John, despite the fact that in many, many cases Kannon's little collection of bathroom humor outsold the top-selling book on display. It made no best-seller list, in any newspaper, despite the fact that a sale of 250,000 (or, cutting Kannon's estimate in half, 125,000) topped even so notable a best seller as Theodore White's The Making of the President.

It is occasionally in a publisher's interest to call attention to the deficiencies of the best-seller lists. In March 1949, for example, Harcourt, Brace created a furor in the industry by taking an ad in The New York Times to reproduce the Times list for February 20, which had The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton in 11th place. The publisher contended that on the basis of his sales figures of 60,000 copies, Mr. Merton's book should have been in first place. Harcourt, Brace closed with this challenge: "If any publisher can show better sales figures than these for the same period on any book from the above list, we will buy this space for him to say so next Monday." Nobody accepted.

Many publishers complain that the compilers of best-seller lists ignore such staples of the industry as cookbooks and home decoration guides. The newspapers have simply decided to consider these volumes outside their ken, although a popular cookbook will often outsell even the number one best seller on both of the major lists, week in, week out. Recently, Dutton issued a new Mickey Spillane novel in hard-cover edition. Spillane, reigning king of the paperbacks, also has a rather large hard-cover sale, a sale impressive enough to put it easily up among the first 10 in the best-seller list if the compilers of the list recognize the legitimacy of whodunits. But along with cookbooks, whodunits -- even by Spillane -- don't count.

Both the Times and the Herald Tribune are aware of the weaknesses of their systems, and both have tried and are trying to strengthen them. The Times' rule of doubling the figures from large cities is an effort -- though an arbitrary one -- at compensating for the obvious inequality between a small Main Street bookstore in the South and Macy's book department in Manhattan. The Herald Tribune is demonstrating its concern over the problem of geographic representation by changing its reporting stores regularly. It has recently revised its format for the book section, and in an effort to give a boost to books that have not broken into the best-seller columns, the Tribune now includes a weekly box, Our Book Editors Suggest This Week.

But even if a practical, foolproof method of measuring the nation's reading tastes were devised, best-seller lists would still stand as tributes to conformity. For people who can't bear the burden of deciding for themselves what they want to read, the lists, however inaccurate, are a boon. For those who tremble at the thought of not being au courant, the lists are no doubt indispensable.

But, fortunately, for persons who prefer to find their ideas and their pleasures in their own ways, the best-seller lists can, with just a little effort, be ignored.