It’s still January, and time to look at the books of 50, 100 and 150 years ago. I have identified the most popular books published in 1974, 1924 and 1874, and ranked them by the average of their Goodreads and LibraryThing ratings, taking the top 20, top 15 and top 10 respectively. This doesn’t say anything about literary merit, it’s just a metric of the books owned on the main online personal catalogue sites, and maybe an indication of staying power (or visibility in literature courses).The results are as follows:

	1974	LT	GR
1	Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein	13,524	1,373,526
2	Carrie, by Stephen King	14,250	700,238
3	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig	18,546	227,974
4	The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman	9,256	163,988
5	The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin	10,495	121,280
6	Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carré	8,271	93,011
7	The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara	8,627	85,212
8	Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi	4,881	144,351
9	Jaws, by Peter Benchley	3,935	160,825
10	The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle	6,229	69,423
11	All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward	4,584	54,323
12	The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier	4,865	44,647
13	Alive, by Piers Paul Read	2,323	74,857
14	Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick	4,218	40,542
15	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard	5,370	26,755
16	Centennial, by James Michener	2,967	42,895
17	There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, by Dr. Seuss	3,708	33,724
18	Blubber, by Judy Blume	3,497	35,452
19	If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin	2,025	57,700
20	The Power Broker, by Robert Caro	2,813	20,806

To my surprise, I had never heard of Shel Silverstein or of his poetry collection for children which tops this particular poll. I guess he didn’t manage to cross the Atlantic (just the word “sidewalk” would be a barrier). If you don’t know the title poem, here it is:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

The USA’s best-selling book of 1974 was Centennial, by James Michener, which has slipped to 16th place here.

All originally published in English; 19/20 by white folks; 17/20 by men; 6 non-fiction; 5 sf/horror; 5 adult fiction other than sf/horror (counting Jaws); 2 YA novels; Dr Seuss; and Silverstein (but it is top).

	1924	LT	GR
1	The Box-car Children, by Gertrude C. Warner	8,631	132,621
2	A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster	12,254	79,260
3	We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin	8,265	94,910
4	The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann	9,414	48,315
5	The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie	3,424	109,435
6	Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda	3,083	70,399
7	Poirot Investigates, by Agatha Christie	3,417	62,649
8	When We Were Very Young, by A. A. Milne	5,389	25,479
9	Billy Budd, by Herman Melville	1,967	17,637
10	The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany	2,244	7,569
11	So Big, by Edna Ferber	973	10,607
12	A Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka	388	17,659
13	Naomi, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki	937	7,071
14	Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi	597	2,783
15	The Three Hostages, by John Buchan	551	1,161

Again, I had not heard of the top book on this list, and again it’s an American children’s classic, the first in a long series.

I had some tricky boundary cases here. In the end I disqualified The Collected Emily Dickinson (material not first published in 1924) and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell (not a book), and I decided that most people mean Hemingway’s 1925 volume In Our Time rather than the different and shorter 1924 collection with the same title. I allowed Billy Budd, even though it was first published in 1924 as part of a volume of Melville’s collected writings, because it has a long subsequent history of standalone publishing. (Melville had died in 1891, a third of a century earlier.)

The USA’s top-selling book of 1924 in 1924 was Edna Ferber’s So Big, in 1th place here.

9/15 written in English, two in German, one each in Spanish, Japanese, Hungarian and Russian. NB that We was first published in English translation; the Russian original was not published until 1952.

14/15 by white folks; 11/15 by men (two books by Agatha Christie, two by other women).

8 adult non-sf novels, 2 sf/fantasy, 2 children’s books, 2 short fiction collections and one poetry collection.

	1874
1	Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy	11,152	151,007
2	The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (1874-75 serialisation)	4,661	53,410
3	The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope (1874-75 serialisation)	2,802	13,156
4	Ninety-Three, by Victor Hugo	1,118	5,591
5	The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Gustave Flaubert	938	2,995
6	Pepita Jiménez, by Juan Valera	506	2,198
7	The Three-cornered Hat, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón	443	1,642
8	The Conquest of Plassans, by Émile Zola	368	1,812
9	The Hand and the Glove, by Machado de Assis	170	1,538
10	Zaragoza, by Benito Pérez Galdós	76	530

This time I have indeed heard of the top book on the list; indeed, it’s the only one of them that I have read. There’s also a clear ranking in that LT and GR both agree on the top six and what order they come in.

Again, some boundary cases. Phineas Redux and Lady Anna, both by Anthony Trollope, were serialised from 1873-74 so I count them in the earlier year. The great Australian novel For the Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, was serialised in 1870-72. Middlemarch was first published in a single volume in 1874, but it had been out for some time.

10/10 by men (top books from this year by women are Johnny Ludlow, by Ellen Wood, and Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803, by Dorothy Wordsworth, who had died in 1855). 9/10 by white folks (Machado de Assis was the grandson of slaves).

You could count The Mysterious Island as sf, but the others are all mundane novels.

4 in French, 3 in Spanish, 2 in English, 1 in Portuguese.

So, perhaps a little reading project there, once the Hugos are over.