Bookend
Now that both The Observer and The Sunday Times have employed phalanxes of distinguished writers and critics to name their book of the year, we should all know what to have bought for Christmas — or, at !east, what to have asked for. But what are the books being bought this Christmas? Needless to say, it is a very different kind of list which the booksellers provide.
Smith's Trade News runs a weekly list of top sellers, and in the last few weeks has also been running a poll of booksellers throughout the country to find out what they think will sell well at Christmas. What emerges from the poll is what publishers' reps tell their editors whenever they have a chance — that booksellers have a remarkably shrewd idea of what their customers are likely to ask for, even before the book goes on sale. Last week's bestsellers in W. H. Smith branches throughout the country were The Guiness Book of Records, Bear Island by Alastair Maclean, Chay Blyth's The Impossible Voyage, Monty Python's Big Red Book, the latest Agatha Christie, Nemesis, and Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man; with David Niven's memoirs, The Moon's a Balloon as runner-up. Of the booksellers, six voted for Nemesis and five for Bear Island and Monty Python.
Bookend conducted its own survey of some of the bigger London bookshops to see if their lists were at all different. But much the same story emerged from Foyles, Hatchards, and Truslove and Hanson: Monty Python, David Niven, Jane Goodall and Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (Collins do particularly well in bestseller lists at this season).
Only Dillon's Bookshop and Better Books had significantly different lists to give. Dillon's showed its predominantly student clientele by providing Monty Python, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (just the thing for wives cooking the Christmas lunch) and The Life and Times of Private Eye. And Better Books got nearest of all to the critics' Christmas list with its bestselling titles: Bob Dylan, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul and Carlos Castaneda. Obviously, in a few scattered households, there will be some serious reading going on after the feasting is over and before the hangovers begin.
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