New York Times Best Seller list
The
New York Times Best Seller List is a weekly chart in
The New York Times newspaper that keeps track of the
best-selling books of the week in the United States of America. It appears in the Sunday
New York Times in the Book Review Section and began on
April 9,
1942 under the title, "The Best Selling Books, Here and Everywhere". The first book to top the list was
The Last Time I Saw Paris by
Elliot Paul.
Unlike some subsequent lists of best sellers,
The New York Times list is not based upon total sales figures, but instead upon surveys of a selected sample of retail booksellers.
The list is divided into Fiction and Non-Fiction sections, which each contains fifteen titles.
The New York Times has created the image among some readers that a successful book is only truly successful if it makes an appearance on this list. Other readers consider a best seller to be a lower form of literature, because it must pander to the
lowest common denominator. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
The New York Times, in its defense, maintains that the list is merely a list, compiled from sales figures of literally best-selling books.
There have been accusations of some books being marketed in a manner designed to place them on the best seller list, so as to boost exposure of the book to a wider audience of potential buyers. Particularly egregious examples include the works by
L. Ron Hubbard,
Battlefield Earth and
Mission Earth.
Similarly, some books are flagged with an
obelus (†) indicating that a significant number of bulk orders had been received by retail bookstores. Since it is normally more economical to place bulk orders for classroom or resale use through wholesalers or publishers, this might indicate that the purchases were made to increase a book's placement in the best seller list.
In
2001, a separate section of the best seller list was created to track the sale of children's books. Critics of
The New York Times best seller lists claim that the children's book list was created especially so that the
Harry Potter book series, which dominated the list for over two years, could be moved to a separate section and other titles allowed to appear on the list.
*
List of bestselling novels in the United States*
Bestseller*
The New York Times Best Seller List (current)*
Previous bestsellers* John Bear,
The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992
