The New York Times Best Seller List
 New York Times Best-seller List |
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. Published weekly in The New York Times Book Review, the best-seller list has been published in the Times since October 12, 1931. In recent years it has evolved into multiple lists in different categories, broken down by fiction and non-fiction, hardcover, paperback, and electronic, and different genres.
Although the first best seller list in America was published in 1895, in The Bookman, a best seller list was not published in The New York Times until 36 years later with little fanfare on October 12, 1931. It consisted of five fiction and four non-fiction books for New York City only. The following month the list was expanded to eight cities, with a separate list published for each city. By the early 1940s, fourteen city-lists were included. A national list was created on April 9, 1942, in The New York Times Book Review (Sundays) as a supplement to the regular city lists (Monday edition). The national list was ranked according to how many times the book appeared in the city lists. A few years later, the city lists were eliminated entirely leaving only the national ranking list, which was compiled according to "reports from leading booksellers in 22 cities". This methodology of ranking by bookseller sales figures remains to this day although the exact data compilation process is a trade secret and has evolved over time.
By the 1950s, The Times's list had become the leading best seller list for book professionals to monitor, along with Publishers Weekly. In the 1960s and 70s, mall-based chain bookstores B. Dalton, Crown Books, and Waldenbooks came to the forefront with a business model of selling newly published best-sellers with mass-market appeal. They used the best-selling status of titles to market the books and not just as a measure of sales; thus placing increased emphasis on the New York Times list for book readers and book sellers.
The list is compiled by the editors of the "News Surveys" department, not by The New York Times Book Review department, where it is published. It is based on weekly sales reports obtained from selected samples of independent and chain bookstores and wholesalers throughout the United States. The sales figures are widely believed to represent books that have actually been sold at retail, rather than wholesale, as the Times surveys booksellers in an attempt to better reflect what is purchased by individual buyers. Some books are flagged with a dagger indicating that a significant number of bulk orders had been received by retail bookstores.
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