I’ve had more than one occasion to look up best-seller lists from decades past, often when I’m researching for this blog. I’ve read my share of books (and my mother read a lot before me, so those books were around the house when I was growing up), but … I haven’t always read the year’s best seller (as determined by Publishers Weekly).

So naturally the notion of “100 years of bestsellers” intrigued me:

When Matthew Kahn, a creative writing student at California State University at Northridge, learned from one of his professors that the bestselling book of 1926 was “The Private Life of Helen of Troy” by John Erskine, he was struck. The class wasn’t reading it, but the book they were reading, “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway, was published the same year. “I thought that was interesting, Kahn told me. “When we think of the books of 1926, we think modernists. We don’t think about the books that most people were actually reading at that time.”

Hemingway is one of those authors whose novels I read more than once when I was a kid (particularly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls). That none of them were number-one best sellers in their time is a little astonishing. (Having said that, I should note John Erskine was no slouch.)

Projects of this nature always interest me (see my favorite book of 2014, for example, or my year of reading nonfiction).

Bottom line for this project, though, is a “best seller” doesn’t always equate to staying power over the long term, although I’ll note I’ve read thirty-six of the ninety-four titles Kahn reviews at his website. How many have you read?

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