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Surprise Christmas Best-sellers and All-time FavouritesIsobel DixonLast year it was Schott’s Original Miscellany which created a Christmas publishing sensation. Incorporating lists of strangely fascinating facts — like how several Burmese kings met their ends, or instructions on how to fold a sari — “this bizarre little book” (said The Sunday Telegraph) “manages to be both totally useless and nearly indispensable.” “Where else, (asks author Ben Schott’s official ‘miscellanies’ website) “will you stumble across John Lennon’s cat, the supplier of bagpipes to the Queen, the twelve labours of Hercules, and the brutal methods of murder encountered by Mrs [sic] Marple?” Ben Schott — a professional photographer who seemed to be as surprised as anyone else when his quirky book so thoroughly captured the imaginations of last year’s Christmas shoppers and has continued to sell strongly since — has followed up with Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany. As the title suggests, the book is filled with trivia pertaining to all things gastronomic, and it is also doing well. But it’s another unusual title which has proved to be the really big surprise seller this year: Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, a remarkable little book published by Profile, about punctuation. Yes, punctuation: the misplaced apostrophe, the art of the comma, the much-neglected semicolon. Yet it’s by no means a dry reference work — the title itself plays on how the misplacement of the comma in the phrase changes the meaning of this description of the habits of the panda. (It should, of course, read, “Eats shoots and leaves”, with no comma.) John Walsh of The Independent says Lynn Truss’s book “makes the history of punctuation a subject at once urgent, sexy and hilarious”. No mean feat. Profile now have 510 000 copies in print and, as I write, it tops not only the Amazon sales ranking, but also the Nielsen Bookscan listing which provides the statistics for the best-seller lists in the national newspapers. I’ve seen commuters on the Northern Line reading the book too, so it can’t be just schoolteachers and journalists who are buying this “Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (the book’s subtitle). Nor can it just be the obsessives who agree with the author that all those guilty of the abuse of the apostrophe — as in “good food at it’s best” — deserve “to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave”. The remarkable popularity of a book on a subject one might consider too abstruse to have wide appeal is surely indicative not only of the author’s accessible and entertaining style, but also of a desire on the part of readers to write better, to get that pesky but oh so essential punctuation right. I find it a cheering thought — both for clarity in the written language and for the happy surprises the book business has to offer. No surprises in the BBC’s Big Read vote, though, where after three quarters of a million votes, the Guardian’s headline was, predictably: “Tolkien runs rings round Big Read Rivals”. Lord of the Rings was triumphant, beating Pride and Prejudice to the top slot. The bookies had long stopped taking bets on the race, since it was considered such a foregone conclusion that Tolkien fans would vote in droves, especially given the timing, just before the release of The Return of the King, the last in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Perhaps if the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice had been more recent Jane Austen wouldn’t have lagged 39 000 votes behind the fantasy frontrunner. The search for the nation’s best-loved books began in April, culminating in the Saturday night series that ran from October to December on BBC2. Well-known personalities presented their favourite books from the shortlist, with short film excerpts dramatising scenes from the novels — a device that landed the programme makers in hot water, since they apparently had not consulted JD Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, for permission to dramatise scenes from his book. The reclusive author is notoriously opposed to any form of dramatisation of his work and not averse to litigation to get his point across. Children’s fiction and the fantastical featured strongly in the Top Ten: after the historical Pride and Prejudice, next up were Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Winnie the Pooh and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also made it to the Top Ten, which featured one more historical novel, Jane Eyre, and George Orwell’s futuristic satire 1984. Only one book in the nation’s ten best-loved (or at least, most voted-for), To Kill a Mockingbird, could be classed as twentieth century realism. Perhaps, as TS Eliot said, this is because “mankind cannot bear too much reality”; but perhaps it is simply that this list contained in the main books that appeal to both young and old, works of the imagination in which the moral themes are thoroughly grounded in good storytelling. And as for the power of entertainment, it can’t be overlooked that so many of the books on the list had already been successfully adapted for film, thus broadening their popular reach. Sales-wise the success of the campaign on national TV has been remarkable. The BBC recently reported that weekly book sales of The Big Read Top 21 titles increased by 425 per cent since the list’s announcement and library lending increased by 56 per cent on the same period last year. Again, the power of film is evident, for sometimes sales of the DVD versions of the novels eclipsed sales of the books: Amazon.co.uk released figures to show that while sales of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin rose by 155 per cent on their sites, the DVD film version starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz increased by 1 533 per cent. Let’s hope some who watched the film also read the book … The Big Read presentation itself wasn’t considered a resounding artistic success, but there was a certain curiosity value in checking out the match of celebrity presenter and classic book: Clare Short on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, William Hague on Birdsong, Ruby Wax on The Catcher in the Rye, Sandi Toksvig on Little Women. And then there’s the pleasure of being reminded of much-loved books (I cast one vote for To Kill a Mockingbird, which my eldest sister read to me in instalments as a child and which I’ve read many times since) and the inspiration to read others that you’ve long felt you should. The kind of thing that Christmas holidays are ideally suited for. Maybe this will at last be the year that I read Catch-22. War and Peace, I fear, may have to wait for my retirement … Ben Schott’s Miscellanies website: http://www.miscellanies.info/ Profile Books: http://www.profilebooks.co.uk And, if the apostrophe is your particular bugbear, check out The Apostrophe Protection Society: http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm The BBC Big Read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/vote/ Nielsen Bookscan: http://www.booktrack.co.uk
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