[Link] What Our Biggest Best-Sellers Tell Us About a Nation’s Soul

by Louis Menand

The “canon” in the title of Jess McHugh’s “Americanon” (Dutton) consists of thirteen American books, from “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which came out in 1989. It includes Webster’s Dictionary, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask),” by David Reuben.

The works are all mega-sellers. McHugh tells us about the McGuffey Readers, textbooks first used in nineteenth-century homes and schools; they sold more than a hundred and thirty million copies—and, since most copies had multiple readers, the total circulation was even larger. Carnegie’s book came out in 1936, has sold more than thirty million copies, and is still in print. Louise Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life” (1984) has sold more than fifty million copies, and Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has sold more than forty million. Betty Crocker’s cookbook has sold more than seventy-five million copies. At least a hundred million inquiring minds have read “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.*”

These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction. Some of the books, such as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” and Emily Post’s “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home,” which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share. McHugh says that “Etiquette” used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible (which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments).

Fifty-seven million copies of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have been sold (I have a copy of the fifth edition, owned by my mother, which was published in 1936), and there are some two billion word searches on Merriam-Webster’s apps every year. The books in McHugh’s canon are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books.

The term “canon” is also, well, loaded. Canons define a tradition, a culture, a civilization by excluding things that don’t belong to it. The claim of “Americanon” is that the enormous and enduring sales numbers of the books McHugh discusses mean that they can be understood to be promoting a national ideology, or what she calls a national myth. She does not think that this is a good thing.

Read the full article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/what-our-biggest-best-sellers-tell-us-about-a-nations-soul