Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900

C. Bloom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780333687420
• eBook ISBN: 9780230287495
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This guide and reference work of all of the bestselling books, authors and genres since the beginning of the 20th century, provides an insight into over 100 years of publishing and reading as well as taking us on a journey into the heart of the British imagination.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Origins, Problems and Philosophy of the Bestseller
• 2 How the British Read
• 3 Genre: History and Form
• 4 Best-selling Authors Since 1900
• Appendix 1 Number of individuals out of every 1000 who could not sign their name on a marriage register: 1896–1907
• Appendix 2 Extract from Beatrice Harraden, 'What Our Soldiers Read', Cornhill Magazine, vol. XLI (Nov. 1916)
• Appendix 3 Booksellers from whose returns the Bookseller compiled its bestseller list during the 1930s and 1940s under the title 'What the Other Fellow is Selling'
• Appendix 4 From the Mass Observation Archive (ref. FR 2537): 'Reading in Tottenham, November 1947'
• Appendix 5 From Mills and Boon, 'A FINE ROMANCE… is hard to find'
• Appendix 6 British Library loans 1987–8, showing the top 100 authors as recorded by the Bookseller (13 July 1990)
• Appendix 7 Comparative library loans between 1988 and 1998 by genre (source: Public Lending Right, 1999)
• Appendix 8 Waterstone's and Channel 4's survey to discover the greatest books of the twentieth century (1996)
• Appendix 9 Which companies owned what imprints at the end of the twentieth century (source: Key Note, 1999)
• Appendix 10 Helena Blakemore, 'Gender Bias in Publishing and Reviewing'
• Appendix 11 From the Bookseller (Web page: 20 Dec. 1999)
• Appendix 12 Comparative paperback bestseller lists showing relative change over the last decade of the twentieth century (source: Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, 2001)
• Appendix 13 World Book Day 2000 Poll to find Britain's favourite writers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Title Index