Books: HitParade: 1895-1945

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FIFTY YEARS OF BESTSELLERS, 1895-1945_///ce Payne Hacketf—R. R. Bowker ($3).

Turkish corners were the rage; puff-sleeved, pompadoured pinups from the pen of Charles Dana Gibson blossomed on college study walls; bicycling scorchers menaced pedestrians; and rural free delivery was about to be established by law. The year was 1895. The same year, the late, great, tragic scholar and editor Harry Thurston Peck (Twenty Years of the Republic) began publishing in the Bookman the first U.S. best-seller lists, compiled on the basis of sales in the nation's 30 or 40 leading bookstores.

Readers that year were flocking to buy a bucolic novel about the Scottish village of Drumtochty by Ian Maclaren and a nostalgic romance of Paris' Latin Quarter by a British illustrator named George du Maurier. Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and Trilby became the first "bestsellers" —a new word in the language.

From 50 annual lists published by the Bookman, by Books of the Month (now Bowker Book Guides), and by her own Publishers' Weekly, Associate Editor Alice Payne Hackett has compiled a record of U.S. literary taste from 1895 to the present. Titles like Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower. (1899), John Fox Jr.'s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Michael Arlen's The Green Hat (1925) awake as many memories as old tunes. Winston Churchill was a name on everybody's lips in the first years of the century. It meant not a British statesman but a U.S. author (no kin) whose historical novels of early America (Richard Carvel, The Crisis, etc.) were best-sellers in 1901, '04, '06, '08 and '13.

No Rhyme or Reason. Authors and publishers will be hard put to it to find from this volume why these best-sellers were bestsellers. The Bible remains the champion best-seller of all times, but its closest U.S. competitor is Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller, a textbook first published in 1790 which has sold more than 100 million copies.

At the top of a list of cumulative bestsellers over the years from 1880 to the present is In His Steps, a pious novel by the Rev. Charles Monroe Sheldon describing a community which followed the teachings of Jesus literally. It has sold more than 8,000,000 copies. Close behind, in this order, are Scrapbookster Elbert Hubbard's Message to Garcia (4,000,000), Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (3,625,000), Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People (2,751,000), Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (2,500,000), and Marion Hargrove's See Here, Private Hargrove (2,500,000). Farther down the list are Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Bob Hope's / Never Left Home, with around a million and a half sales each. Anthony Adverse and Edith M. Hull's The Sheik have each sold some 1,190,000 copies. Quo Vadis and the nostalgic travelogue Our Hearts Were Young and Gay also run neck & neck. And Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills is tied at 1,200,000 with H. G. Wells's Outline of History.