Best Sellers Jigsaw Puzzle

  
Hi Puzzlers,

 

Best Sellers Jigsaw Puzzle Item #930



Don’t you just love all of our new puzzles? It seems like each day a new one gets shipped to our warehouse. I like variety and White Mountain Puzzles definitely strives to give its puzzlers a wide range of puzzling choices. My need for variety, like many of you, stretches across the board and into the realm of a good book. So just imagine how delighted I was when Charles Girard designed a new puzzle titled Best Sellers. I was drawn to it like a moth to flames. This new puzzle incorporates my love of puzzles and books. Check out all the titles on the puzzle, I have read most of these bestsellers. Look out White Birch Books and BAM! I’m coming down to buy one of the new bestsellers. But now I’m plagued with the question, “What makes a bestseller, a bestseller?”

In 1895, a monthly magazine called The Bookman published the first American bestseller list. This list was based on book sales. Next, in 1912 the list was published by Publishers Weekly. Publisher Weekly has since become our country’s oldest continuously published Bestseller List. The New York Times began its list in 1942 and since then, most major publications, including USAToday, publish their own variation of a Bestseller List. But, The New York Times continues to claim the top spot for the most popular list.

 The Bookman’s first list contained only works of fiction. Publishers Weekly expanded its list to include works of fiction and non-fiction. The New York Times published its list with the top 15 fiction books and the top 15 non-fiction books.

The Times model of 30 bestsellers continued for more than 40 years. By 1984, the self-help books era was in full swing and extremely popular. Its presence in the publishing industry necessitated a need for a third section. The new section would include the top 15 Advice/How-To books. In 2000, the wildly popular Harry Potter series began to consistently dominate the fiction lists top spots. Publishers worried that these top spots could be held for years by this successful series. The Times acknowledged the publisher’s concern by adding Children’s Books as a fourth section to the list. This addition brings the total for the weekly bestseller list to include 60 books. New sections are continually being added to the list, further solidifying our cultures need for variety.

Today we still use best in sales to rate bestsellers, but how the information is gathered is different from publisher to publisher and the accuracy of the numbers can be subject to errors and exaggerations. Then the issue is further compounded when books go into new editions with a different publisher. One must also take into consideration that some of the bestselling books of all times have made the list due to mandatory purchasing and extensive gift-giving. The historic top three bestsellers fall into this latter point: The Bible, 6.7 billion copies: Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Tse-Tung, 900 million copies: The Qur’an, 800 million copies.

Bestsellers capture the imagination and touch the hearts of the reader. Just like a good jigsaw puzzle they can be “Nostalgic”....“Fresh and fascinating”... and “Impossible to put down”.

Happy Puzzling!