28 April

The British bestseller list arrives (belatedly)

1974 It was on this date, and in the Sunday Times ‘Review’ section, as it then was, that the UK’s first ‘definitive weekly bestseller list’ was published. Keeping a finger in this way on the nation’s reading pulse had been routine in the United States since the 1890s. Americans loved their bestseller lists.

The UK loathed them. Why? Because they were, as Dickens’s Mr Podsnap would say, ‘un-English’. Foreign even. The ‘trade’ wanted nothing to do with them. Books, traditionalists believed, did not compete against each other. There were no winners and losers in the world of print. Judging a book not by its quality, but by the quantity it happened to sell, was sheer Yankee philistinism. Un-English!

The Sunday Times resolved to change things. It was the right time to do so. The early 1970s was an era of change – much of it painful. The IRA were blowing up everything that didn’t have a shamrock painted on it. ‘Who governs Britain?’ asked Ted Heath, plaintively, from his bunker in Downing Street. No answer was forthcoming. There was a three-day week, rolling energy cuts, double-digit inflation. Times Newspapers, which had dared to embrace technological processes marginally more advanced than William Caxton’s, was at war with the print unions.

Amid this turmoil, the Sunday Times bestseller list was born. Harold Evans (an arrant Americanophile) had been appointed editor with a new-broom remit. Photo-composition (as it was then called) was one swish of the broom. With another swish, Evans appointed computer whiz Peter Harland as his right-hand man in charge of ‘New Technology’. On appointment in 1973, Harland was charged with setting up a books bestseller list.

Publishers were implacably hostile. Harland was obliged to work from the retail end, laboriously monitoring weekly sales in some 300 bookshops, with elaborate checks to prevent the corrupt practices that infected the music industry’s pop charts. Crunching the numbers, in the few hours available weekly, was a formidable challenge.

The Observer got wind of what Harland was up to, and in an attempt to spike its rival’s guns, promptly bought rights to the impressionistic fortnightly listing distributed with Gee’s Booksellers’ Newsletter. So as not to be pipped at the post, Harland and Evans rushed their first list out on 28 April 1974. The pros and cons of bestsellerism were argued, furiously, for weeks thereafter.

The Observer (which to this day remains cool about lists) dropped its fortnightly charts in January 1975, citing ‘lack of variety’ and the banality of ‘all those television based books’. The Sunday Times list, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. Harland, on leaving the paper a few years later, founded Bookwatch, one of today’s most trusted data-gatherers.

In fiction, the top-selling hardback titles in 1974, as the Sunday Times recorded, were Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War and Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s Early Cases. In paperback fiction, the runaway bestseller was Richard Adams’s Watership Down. In the April 1974 list, Iris Murdoch made an appearance, for a week or two, with The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (one suspects that book-buyers confused it Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine: a very different kettle of fish).