What we love about bestseller lists is that they strip us down to just the facts. To find out who we are is to find out who you are, which is to say, what you, our customers, buy. How are we different from other stores? Well, to start, notice what isn't at the top of our bestseller list. Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, doesn't even make our top 20. What does top our list? The top three are critically-acclaimed works of literary fiction--for that matter half of the top ten are. (Okay, so 4 of the other 5 are the books in the Twilight series. We're not quite that immune to trends.) And while we're speaking of trends to which we're not immune, 4 of the 5 books in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series clock in between numbers 11 and 18, with the straggler appearing at number 38. Other trends we noticed: It's obvious we're across the street from a movie theater, since 14 of our top 100 for the year are books made into movies this year, from Time Traveler's Wife and Push, to Mastering the Art of French Cooking (we're blaming Julie & Julia for that one). Thanks to OPRF Freshman and Sophomore summer reading requirements, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian came in at #28, and Tuesdays With Morrie was #65. We are, however, concerned about the considerably smaller numbers of Juniors and Seniors that seem to be doing their summer reading. In case it comes as a surprise to you, our customers seem to be somewhat left-leaning politically, considering our list is populated with two Obama books, Ted Kennedy's memoir, a Nader book, a book by Nader's former campaign manager, and not a single book by a Fox News Personality, conservative radio host, or a certain former governor of Alaska. We swear we would stock those other books more heavily if people ever came in to buy them! Supply and demand, we're told, is one of the fundamentals of our economic system. And finally, the joy of the local bookstore, is of course the localness. Five Oak Park authors made the list, along with 3 Chicago authors. And we counted 9 books, whether fiction or nonfiction, that cover Oak Park or Chicago. Fiction beat nonfiction by 40 titles to 35 (note that we count anything that isn't a novel or short story collection as nonfiction, so that includes humor titles like Cake Wrecks and FU Penguin). And children's and young adult books made the list 25 times (most of which were fiction as well). Thanks to you, our customers, for making this such a great list. We had a great year! |
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