Bestseller by Robert McParland

Author:Robert McParland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

1979

Thousands of people were actively buying and reading books, and some of those books became “bestsellers.” Michael Korda points out that since books get passed around like this, the figures for hardcover book reading “are in some ways misleading.”[15] The novels of bestselling popular authors in the 1980s and 1990s were selling more than a million copies per book and sometimes more than two million. Brand authors carried the industry. Their books earned more than seven figures in sales.[16]

Meanwhile, the quality paperback book emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. The cover was sturdier, and the paper was more durable. The movement of bookstores into shopping malls in the 1970s was followed by a period in which they were gradually swept away in the 1980s and 1990s by the multistory superstores of Barnes & Noble. In the big stores these popular books were placed out in front on displays. The stores became social centers, albeit one of mostly strangers to each other, many of whom were seeking the same books. Bestsellers were marked down. Classics were discounted. Readers bought more hardcovers and did not have to wait for the less expensive paperback.

Wouk’s The Winds of War stayed at #1 in the new year. On February 25, 1979, Arthur Hailey’s Overload brought a story on the utility industry to the #1 spot for two weeks. Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold was #1 on April 22, 1979. Gold has received an advance for his book on Jewish people in America. Heller is best known for Catch 22, a book that is more convincing and moving. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice told the story of one woman’s awful decision during the Holocaust. The story of the Polish woman, Sophie, and Nathan, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland, was #1 on July 22 and stayed in the top ten for the rest of the year. Summer reading brought Shibumi by Trevanian about the international activities of an assassin; Peter Benchley’s The Island; and fictional speculations on The Third World War by British general John Hackett and other NATO generals.

The dilemma of the Iranian Revolution flashed out in January, and the shah fled the country on January 16. He was allowed into the United States, and students in Tehran stormed the U.S. embassy and took sixty-six hostages. President Carter was unable to free them. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan the Soviet Union went to war. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher became the Conservative prime minister. The leaking of coolant from a reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, unnerved many people; the emergency occurred when the radioactive core at the facility was exposed by a nuclear malfunction. During the year, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. People played Trivial Pursuit and put earphones into their ears to listen to music on their Walkmans.

Meanwhile, the public had a taste for celebrity biographies. There was the tell-all about actress Joan Crawford by Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest, and Lauren Bacall’s autobiography, Lauren Bacall by Myself. The Crawford book spent ten weeks at #1 on the list, beginning on November 26, 1978, and extending its run at #1 into 1979.

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