Our book today is surely one of the all-time classics of the Ink Chorus: Claud Cockburn’s 1972, er, bestseller Bestseller, in which our author subjects a dozen bygone bestselling novels to a forensic examination that’s both erudite and often hilarious, biting but also oddly sympathetic. He takes a tour through some of the bestselling novels in England from 1900 to 1939, taking advantage of the passage of time to see some reading standards of the previous generation with a more clinical eye, and although the entire book is absolutely invigorating, by far its most enjoyable aspect is also a bit surprising: Cockburn respects the phenomenon of the bestseller itself. It’s true that he liberally spreads snarky aspersions on the books he’s examining, but he doesn’t for a single paragraph seem to doubt the validity of examining them in the first place, not only as works of (admittedly often wretched) prose but also as invaluable bellwethers:

The bestseller lists are an indispensable guide to problems here arising. You cannot quarrel with them. You can say that they are not an index of literary merit. You can claim the best people did not read the bestsellers. But you cannot deny that if Book X was what a huge majority of book-buyers and book-borrowers wanted to buy or borrow in a given year, or over a period of years, then Book X satisfied a need, and expressed and realized emotions and attitudes to life which the buyers and borrowers did not find expressed or realized elsewhere.

He writes engaging, thought-provoking inspections of such old stand-by hits as The Broad Highway by Jeffery Farnol, When It Was Dark by Guy Thorne, The Beloved Vagabond by W. J. Locke, The Blue Lagoon by H. deVere Stacpoole, and If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson. And along the way, he makes one ice-sharp aside after another about the nature of the book market, the moods of the book-buying public, and some of the assumptions attending wide-demographic works of fiction just in general:

In the Middle Ages drama was based upon the commonly known Christian story, or on other Biblical myths such as the story of Adam and Eve. At that time everyone had a pretty good idea what that serpent was up to. In Athens everyone knew who murdered or was going to murder Agamemnon. Everyone knew that Oedipus was going to kill his father and marry his mother. Nobody was sitting agape in the audience waiting for the moment when someone would rush on stage shouting, ‘Don’t marry her, she’s your mum!’

Cockburn is hypnotically encyclopedic, although he’s more vulnerable than he seems on the surface. Take that initial assertion of his I quoted above, about how you just can’t quarrel with the bestseller list of any day or era being an accurate X-ray, a sure indication of what was satisfying a need with the general reading public: he’s absolutely sure when he’s making that assertion, but he’s almost certainly mistaken, because he’s making the fundamental mistake made by so many amateur students of demography: he’s assuming that if Phenomenon X doesn’t apply to him, it probably doesn’t apply to anybody. Cockburn was a brilliant thinker and an original prose stylist (it almost goes without saying that his entire body of work is out of print in the US, right?); it simply doesn’t occur to him that the vast majority of readers who buy a bestseller are buying it after they already know it’s a bestseller – his assertion fails to take simple lemming-like biddability into account. Books become bestsellers because they answer a need in the reading public, yes; but they also become bestsellers because the reading public is and always has been weirdly desperate for recommendations. Cockburn never needed a book recommendation in his life – most dyed-in-wool book people never do. Which might make it tougher then usual for them to comprehend the fogged-in groping that the vast majority of readers do every time they walk into a bookstore.

But on one aspect of the bestseller as a kind of book, Cockburn is spot-on, and this acuity is seen most clearly in the most famous chapter of Bestseller, the one devoted to E. M. Hull’s enormously successful novel The Sheik, about a proper young lady who’s abducted by a savage-yet-suave wealthy desert warlord. Cockburn makes some fascinating points about out-and-out pornography in the marketplace, and no reader in 2016 will see those points without noticing how little things have changed:

“Would it not be wiser, after what you have seen today, to recognize that I am master?”

“You mean that you will treat me as you treated that colt this afternoon?” she whispered.

“I mean that you must realize that my will is law.”

“And if I do not?”

“”Then I will teach you, and I think that you will learn – soon.”

She quivered in his hands.

One quick search-and-replace, and you’ve got Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Grey. Satisfies a need indeed …