Apr

23

The enclosed list of best selling books of all time  is an excellent indicator of popular culture I think, and should have interesting market applications. How would one dig down into that, and do you think or do you think it's not applicable?

Steve Ellison writes:

The first thing I notice is what a diverse list it is. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy book. Think and Grow Rich is a self help book. There are conventional novels, children's books, religious books, and even a book about science by Stephen Hawking.

Charles Pennington comments: 

Who'd have guessed that A Tale of Two Cities is the best seller (single volume) of all time? I didn't even know it was the best-selling Dickens novel, which apparently it is by a factor of 20, since no other Dickens novels appear in the list. That's very surprising; am I misinterpreting?

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

No misinterpretation here. ATOTC was so wildly popular in the U.S. - like all Dickens' writings - that people in New York and Boston and Baltimore (? not absolutely certain about that one) literally waited at the dock for the packet to arrive from England with the latest installment. One reason Dickens disliked America and Americans is that some of our enterprising ancestors are known to have bought a copy of the latest serial, set it in type over night and had reprints out on the street the following morning for sale - at, of course, a suitable discount from the price of the legitimate copies.

Tale of Two Cities was also the last book that "Phiz" illustrated. Starting with The Pickwick Papers, Dickens has written "monthly parts" that were sold as part of a serial publication. (It literally revolutionized British publishing.) The serials were close to being graphic novels. Robert Seymour, George Cruikshank, and George Cattermole all did illustrations. Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882) — "Phiz" — did the ones that are best remembered. When Dickens began self-publishing in his own weekly periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round, Dickens fired his friend as chief illustrator. The parallels with Walt Disney are interesting.

Pitt T. Maner III writes:

In digging down a bit one sees that 3 of the authors, with over 100 million copies sold, are buried within a couple of hundred miles of each other in England (within a shared cultural environment) and that some of their literary themes had connections with class or race distinctions and warfare /murder (Dickens–French Revolution, Tolkien–races of mythological creatures, Christie– see wiki article on And Then There Were None (which originally had a different title and is about murderers from different classes being tricked into meeting on an island and being tricked in some cases into bumping each other off).

There is a whole series of study devoted to the Chinese book Redology and (having not read it), " Dream of the Red Chamber" appears to involve issues of class mobility.

Tsao Hsueh-chin, the author of A Dream of Red Mansions, lived between 1715 and 1763. His ancestral family once held great power. As such, he led a wealthy noble life in Nanjing as a child. When he was 13 or 14, the family was declining and moved to Beijing, where life took a turn for the worse. In his later years, he even led a poor life.Drawing on his own experience, Tsao Hsueh-chin put all his life experiences, poeticized feelings, exploratory spirit and creativity into the greatest work of all time - A Dream of Red Mansions. Drawing its materials from real life, the novel is full of the author's personal feelings filled with blood and tears.

A Dream of Red Mansions is a novel with great cultural richness. It depicts a multi-layered yet inter-fusing tragic human world through the eye of a talentless stone the Goddess used for sky mending. Jia Baoyu, the incarnation of the stone, witnessed the tragic lives of "the Twelve Beauties of Nanjing", experienced the great changes from flourishing to decline of a noble family and thus gained unique perception of life and the mortal world. Revolving around Jia Baoyu and focusing on the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai against the backdrop of the Great View Garden, the novel portrays a tragedy in which love, youth and life are ruined as well as exposes and profoundly reflects the root of the tragedy – the feudal system and culture.

Found here.

Terrible things can happen if you leave the rich and powerful unchecked and unpunished… is that close to the themes that may be partially beneath the success and appeal of the above best sellers of all time.

The meme being that it will be back to the dark ages of murder and mayhem on earth if government social services are the least bit underfunded and the rich continue to not pay their fair share.

Dylan Distasio writes:

I thought it might also be worthwhile to look at bestsellers by decade. There is a course on 20th century American literature that has been kind enough to share their materials with the interwebs. The full list by decade for the 20th century is at the below link and is worth checking out.

Pitt T. Maner III comments:

In my first paid job as a 12-year old library aide, Agatha Christie made shelving a pile of returned books easy– her works constituted 10% of the pile and were quickly put back with little effort to the same spacious shelf location. I remember reading "Jaws" then, a book hugely popular at the time.

It is doubtful, however, that the Palm Beach socialites checking out multiple Christie books each week would ascribe her popularity to the "Burkean paradigm".

The following is a piece on Christie from a self-described "Wilsonian". Perhaps an example of reading into things a bit too much…the retrospective reasons for success when starting with a point of view.

Her work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather, it arises from within civil society – a private detective, a clever old spinster. Indeed, what is Miss Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke's thought? She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has slowly – like parliament and all traditional bodies, according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages", and this is the key to her success. From her solitary spot in a small English village, she has learned everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in Christie and Burke's worlds, in the very old and the very ordinary.


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