Forgotten Best Sellers(laphamsquarterly.org)
laphamsquarterly.org
Forgotten Best Sellers
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/forgotten-best-sellers
39 comments
I don' think that is big issue in countries with good public libraries.
Library access and quality where I've lived in the US is fantastic, and at least in California access to all local libraries is extended to any state resident so there isn't a significant socioeconomic hurdle, and other places I lived in at least had very convenient interlibrary loaning. I live in Switzerland now, and quite frankly so far I've been slightly disappointed by the non-university resources even in a larger city here, both in physical buildings and online, but I haven't explored the full reaches of it yet.
I love old Best Sellers. Don't think that article was real helpful in listing any.
For example, pretty much everything by Michener is amazing, but nobody cares about him any more. He's dismissed as some kind of trashy or middlebrow post WW-2 writer; maybe he was -but he's also almost always a lot of fun to read, and occasionally incredibly interesting.
The Bjorndal Saga by Trygve Gulbranssen is largely forgotten in the US (maybe less so in Norway), but won all kinds of presidential awards and was a big deal in its day. It's sort of like "The Leopard" which is less forgotten, since they made a decent movie out of it (probably the great Italian novel). Greater novel though, in my opinion.
Another one I picked up because of an interview with Jim Simons; Jan de Hartog's "the Captain" -so far so good; was a big deal back in its day; it's predecessor "Captain Jan" was important enough it figured into Holland's war story. Totally forgotten now in the anglosphere anyway, and I'd have never heard of it if it weren't for a one off statement by an important guy who could hardly remember the name himself.
Dennis Wheatley is another huge best seller from the Ian Fleming era of trash novels; loads of fun to read -vastly better than Fleming. Alas, the movies they made of his books were all "video nasties" rather than James Bond.
None of these are Nobel Prize in Literature tier books, they vary wildly in quality, but they're loads of fun to read now as they were back then. Books don't always need to be an exercise in self improvement.
For example, pretty much everything by Michener is amazing, but nobody cares about him any more. He's dismissed as some kind of trashy or middlebrow post WW-2 writer; maybe he was -but he's also almost always a lot of fun to read, and occasionally incredibly interesting.
The Bjorndal Saga by Trygve Gulbranssen is largely forgotten in the US (maybe less so in Norway), but won all kinds of presidential awards and was a big deal in its day. It's sort of like "The Leopard" which is less forgotten, since they made a decent movie out of it (probably the great Italian novel). Greater novel though, in my opinion.
Another one I picked up because of an interview with Jim Simons; Jan de Hartog's "the Captain" -so far so good; was a big deal back in its day; it's predecessor "Captain Jan" was important enough it figured into Holland's war story. Totally forgotten now in the anglosphere anyway, and I'd have never heard of it if it weren't for a one off statement by an important guy who could hardly remember the name himself.
Dennis Wheatley is another huge best seller from the Ian Fleming era of trash novels; loads of fun to read -vastly better than Fleming. Alas, the movies they made of his books were all "video nasties" rather than James Bond.
None of these are Nobel Prize in Literature tier books, they vary wildly in quality, but they're loads of fun to read now as they were back then. Books don't always need to be an exercise in self improvement.
I'm a big fan of "fun to read" "trashy" novels. Raymond Chandler (author of the Philip Marlowe detective novels) once said that when he got stuck writing he would have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I randomly picked de Hartog's "The Captain" off the shelf while wandering through the stacks at my local library last year. It was a wonderful read, and the experience was a valuable reminder that serendipity can still be found in an age of Amazon shopping lists and infinite scroll ebook readers.
Mechanically popping the next book off of my self-assigned queue rarely inspires the same sense of reading purely for curiosity or pleasure.
Mechanically popping the next book off of my self-assigned queue rarely inspires the same sense of reading purely for curiosity or pleasure.
As the article notes, this is just the introductory note for an upcoming series of posts discussing forgotten bestsellers. If you come back in two weeks, when the series has run its course, you ought to find quite a few listed:
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
oh man, Wheatley. I read "The Devil Rides Out" on a bus when i ran away from home at fourteen. Brings back some memories. Probably would find it pretty hokey today.
If you like Tom Baker and Sean Pertwee cheese, it will stand the test of time.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/05/dennis-wheatle...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/05/dennis-wheatle...
Michener is the mundanes' Stephenson?
The Gadfly[1] is an interesting one. Sold 2.5 million copies in the Soviet Union. 2 million copies in China. Mostly unheard of in the West.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gadfly
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gadfly
another reason to repost a link to Now Then https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
Spoilers.
"
George Boole - who helped start all this with his Boolean Logic had an extraordinary family.
...
But George Boole had another daughter called Ethel. She had an amazing life - which showed that there is another way. Because Ethel believed in the future.
...
Then Reilly deserted her - and went off to Russia where he worked as a secret agent for the British. Ian Fleming is said to have used Reilly as the model for James Bond.
Ethel was heartbroken - and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly which, although she never admitted it, her biographer says is obviously based on the early adventures of Sydney Reilly.
It's the most amazing book. It's an over the top melodrama set in Italy about the hero, Arthur's battle against the church and the corrupt state - and his treacherous family. At the same time it is about his passionate love for an english girl - Gemma. It ends with Arthur being slowly tortured and then condemned to be shot.
Its message though is a revolutionary one. Arthur is sacrificed so that humankind can be redeemed and open the way to a realisation of the future possibilities for the world - once the old oppressive forces have been overthrown.
The Gadfly was published in 1897 in New York - under Ethel's married name, E.L. Voynich. No British publisher would touch it because of its "outrageous and horrible character". But then it was published in Russia and became an astonishing success. One writer describes how all the young Bolsheviks read it and "it virtually became the bible of the revolution".
By the 1960s it was estimated that 250 million Russian teenagers had read the Gadfly in translation. And polls showed that Arthur was consistently the favourite hero of Soviet youth. And in 1955 a film version was made - with a soundtrack by Shostakovich - which won an award at the Cannes film festival.
In 1920 Ethel went back to her husband Wilfred Voynich. He had moved to New York and had become one of the world's greatest expert and dealers in rare books.
His most famous purchase was a mysterious manuscript written in code that has come to be known as The Voynich Manuscript. No one has ever been able to break the code - it seems to have many scientific references, and herbal and astronomical illustrations.
"
Spoilers.
"
George Boole - who helped start all this with his Boolean Logic had an extraordinary family.
...
But George Boole had another daughter called Ethel. She had an amazing life - which showed that there is another way. Because Ethel believed in the future.
...
Then Reilly deserted her - and went off to Russia where he worked as a secret agent for the British. Ian Fleming is said to have used Reilly as the model for James Bond.
Ethel was heartbroken - and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly which, although she never admitted it, her biographer says is obviously based on the early adventures of Sydney Reilly.
It's the most amazing book. It's an over the top melodrama set in Italy about the hero, Arthur's battle against the church and the corrupt state - and his treacherous family. At the same time it is about his passionate love for an english girl - Gemma. It ends with Arthur being slowly tortured and then condemned to be shot.
Its message though is a revolutionary one. Arthur is sacrificed so that humankind can be redeemed and open the way to a realisation of the future possibilities for the world - once the old oppressive forces have been overthrown.
The Gadfly was published in 1897 in New York - under Ethel's married name, E.L. Voynich. No British publisher would touch it because of its "outrageous and horrible character". But then it was published in Russia and became an astonishing success. One writer describes how all the young Bolsheviks read it and "it virtually became the bible of the revolution".
By the 1960s it was estimated that 250 million Russian teenagers had read the Gadfly in translation. And polls showed that Arthur was consistently the favourite hero of Soviet youth. And in 1955 a film version was made - with a soundtrack by Shostakovich - which won an award at the Cannes film festival.
In 1920 Ethel went back to her husband Wilfred Voynich. He had moved to New York and had become one of the world's greatest expert and dealers in rare books.
His most famous purchase was a mysterious manuscript written in code that has come to be known as The Voynich Manuscript. No one has ever been able to break the code - it seems to have many scientific references, and herbal and astronomical illustrations.
"
Thanks. I actually knew some of those connections but by no means all!
Interesting connection to the Voynich Manuscript. I believe the latest view is the manuscript is a fraud (made to look older than it is with a purposeful furtive author and purpose). None of this takes away from its mystique to me, and none of that takes away from The Gadfly!
Maybe the Voynich manuscript was written by Ethel, she certainly had the pedigree that she could have managed it.
Interesting. I'd love to follow this series of posts, but I couldn't find an RSS feed, so there is zero chance I'll ever remember to revisit this site. Pity.
Problem is, it is a general feed with all their content. I don't want that. Article in question doesn't even appear in the initial feed preview.
They have a nice logical structure on their website: I expect all posts on the subject to appear in their /roundtable/ section. So this URL not having an RSS is just sad. It's so simple to do!
They have a nice logical structure on their website: I expect all posts on the subject to appear in their /roundtable/ section. So this URL not having an RSS is just sad. It's so simple to do!
I haven’t used this particular feed but if they tag articles properly or use keywords that RSS readers such as NewsBlur (which I use) can filter in or out articles that you want.
often linked to from https://aldaily.com/ and listed on its left bar of sources.
The article didn’t deliver for me. As another commenter mentioned, there were so few books listed that the article is almost not worth reading. I expect follow-up articles to be similarly vacuous.
And the author seemed to want to focus on forgotten books written by women and Blacks. Ok, that’s fine, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good books. How about focusing on forgotten books that were popular in their day regardless of the author’s race or gender? (Which may and may not include women and Blacks but also Jews, LGBTQ, and even Whites in no particular marginalized group).
And the author seemed to want to focus on forgotten books written by women and Blacks. Ok, that’s fine, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good books. How about focusing on forgotten books that were popular in their day regardless of the author’s race or gender? (Which may and may not include women and Blacks but also Jews, LGBTQ, and even Whites in no particular marginalized group).
Good lord. This is an announcement of a series of in-depth posts by a literary and historical periodical, not a listicle. There will be ten more posts where this came from:
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
Many works by people of color and women have been suppressed or deliberately 'forgotten' by racist and sexist publishers and critics, far more than the white men whose demographic dwarfs the contributions of others regardless of quality. This makes those books worthy of special attention by historians even if they had not, as the post clearly states, already shown their merit by being best sellers on (as you request) their own merits.
https://annotated.laphamsquarterly.org/page/forgotten-best-s...
Many works by people of color and women have been suppressed or deliberately 'forgotten' by racist and sexist publishers and critics, far more than the white men whose demographic dwarfs the contributions of others regardless of quality. This makes those books worthy of special attention by historians even if they had not, as the post clearly states, already shown their merit by being best sellers on (as you request) their own merits.
Normally when I think of forgotten best sellers I think novels that are pretty good stories told quickly but perhaps not as well as they could have been and without any great intellectual heft to them.
The books that stick with me that are largely forgotten are the Merlin books from Mary Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart_(novelist)#The_Me... and Chaim Potok's books like The Chosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_(Potok_novel), they have a certain nostalgic importance for me while I can still see that they were not especially important otherwise.
The books that stick with me that are largely forgotten are the Merlin books from Mary Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart_(novelist)#The_Me... and Chaim Potok's books like The Chosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chosen_(Potok_novel), they have a certain nostalgic importance for me while I can still see that they were not especially important otherwise.
Of course, gutenberg.org is a great resource for those forgotten books.
One of the most popular books from the 19th century was "Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50115
The parallels between P. T. Barnum and Donald Trump were obvious, but P. T. Barnum's jump into politics was far, far kinder.
One of the most popular books from the 19th century was "Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50115
The parallels between P. T. Barnum and Donald Trump were obvious, but P. T. Barnum's jump into politics was far, far kinder.
For the last few years I've had a joke that there is a law that every Goodwill store is required to have a copy of Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, Hunger Games, and/or Left Behind. I wonder if these bestsellers will be forgotten decades from now because clearly a lot of people are not holding onto these books.
Part of that is the sheer volume of those books that were sold. People throw away more copies of Hunger Games in a day than many books will ever sell until the end of time. Like the anecdote about Pablo Escobar losing 2 billion dollars every year due to rats and mold destroying his mountains of cash that he was unable to store in banks (for obvious reasons).
The charity Turning the Page runs Carpe Librum pop-up used bookstores in Washington, DC. When one opened downtown some years ago, I walked in and saw 30+ (I counted) copies of Eat, Pray, Love on the discount shelves.
Probably not - if something gets as popular as these it isn't likely they're going to be forgotten anytime soon, least of all the Hunger Games.
Many of them will probably grow into 'classics' in the decades following, and it's a bit rare to see them just fade into obscurity, but it happens.
Many of them will probably grow into 'classics' in the decades following, and it's a bit rare to see them just fade into obscurity, but it happens.
Isn't part of the point of the article that some books were best sellers and yet they are forgotten?
Hunger Games is written for a teen audience, and like most books targeted to that demographic, will simply go out of fashion and disappear.
Yes, I read it :-)
Yes, I read it :-)
ah yes, like all the other flash-in-the-pan teen novels:
to kill a mockingbird, the hobbit, the catcher in the rye, the lord of the rings, fahrenheit 451, anne of green gables, the lord of the flies, flowers for algernon, dune, the call of the wild, treasure island, and the narnia series.
Yes, I know many books in that category fade away, but only time will tell if hunger games is one of the ones that fade, or one of the ones that lasts
to kill a mockingbird, the hobbit, the catcher in the rye, the lord of the rings, fahrenheit 451, anne of green gables, the lord of the flies, flowers for algernon, dune, the call of the wild, treasure island, and the narnia series.
Yes, I know many books in that category fade away, but only time will tell if hunger games is one of the ones that fade, or one of the ones that lasts
Many of those are now recognized to have a real artful quality and literary value, which is hardly present in something like the hunger games
Well, I haven't read The Hunger Games, but my readings of criticism of it leads me to think it probably has some sort of real artful quality and literary value - what is your argument that it doesn't?
Don't take my word for it - read it yourself. It's trashy YA kitsch. Contrast with catcher in the rye or LotR afterwards
It also has a completely predictable plot and many deux ex machinas to get our heroine out of a hopeless jam. Its plot is similar to Stephen King's "The Long Walk" which is a far better (and grimmer) book.
I don't think all of those books were necessarily written for the teen / young adult market although I guess they were marketed at it at one time or another.
I wrote "most", not "all". I didn't see anything special or deep in THG.
A lot of people I've talked to in the US enjoy specific books, to a large extent, because they are read by lots of other people at the same time. The spectacle gives the reader a sense of affirmation that the choice was a good one, and for a subset of book genres, wide readership is what allows a fandom to coalesce.
In this setting, an old and unpopular book is bad, because no one else is shipping Bjornstjerne Bjornson characters. It's almost as weird as going back to watch old baseball games.
But if that's not how and why you read, yeah, there are thousands upon thousands of wonderful and unusual books that will narrate a corner of human experience that you've never thought about before.
As an anecdote, Raintree County, a 19th-century family saga set in a fictional Southern town, was a cause celebré when it came out in 1948. The movie rights to it were sold before the novel was even published, and the eventual film won the best picture Oscar, beating out Gone with the Wind! Talk about changing tastes!
[1] e.g., https://observer.com/2016/02/the-truth-about-the-new-york-ti...