The “death of the book” is greatly exaggerated

In spite of the barrage of reports proclaiming the imminent death of the book (not to mention the recent troubles at Borders), sales of The Library of America’s backlist catalog are booming. For the last six months, backlist sales are up 18% over the same period last year. In fact the holiday season was so robust (and the trend seems to be continuing) that we unexpectedly ran out of a couple of dozen titles and have been scrambling to keep the reprints coming fast enough.

Here’s a list of the titles with the most impressive increases in sales compared to last year:

1. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings
2. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
3. William James: Writings 1878–1899
4. Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
5. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
6. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations
7. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose
8. Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964
9. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
10. Willa Cather: Later Novels
    (tie) James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume One

A few of these are easily explained. Beginning last April, Keith Olbermann ended his Friday night broadcasts reading selections from Thurber, and the publication of Bellow’s letters almost certainly spurred renewed interest in his novels. Similarly, we’ve always seen an increase in sales of Grant’s memoirs whenever a new presidential memoir is published. But others on the list are, we confess, gratifyingly perplexing.

Related post: The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

Looking back: The most popular Story of the Week selections and Reader’s Almanac posts

The beginning of the year prompts moments of reflection. Looking back on 2010 The Library of America has been heartened by the warm reception readers gave to two of the year’s initiatives. In January LOA launched Story of the Week to a base of thirty thousand subscribers. That number is now approaching seventy thousand and increasing every week.

The swelling numbers may account for the most popular stories occurring in the past five months. What else connects them? We’ll leave that to you, although watching thousands of readers vault a lesser-known gem like "The Little Room" to the #2 spot makes us think "a good yarn” is as good a guess as any.

1. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – week of November 22
2. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 18
3. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 4
4. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 6
5. “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken  – September 6

In July LOA launched the Reader’s Almanac with daily posts seeking the “enduring” in American literature. The most popular posts often surprised us by spiking traffic five to seven times the average volume. Finding a pattern among them is a bit of a puzzle. Who knew so many readers would find sales data so interesting? Or a decades-old video of ethnographic research? Or an anonymous rejection letter?

1. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
2. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
4. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
5. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

We know that no one would get a greater kick over his appearance on both lists than Mark Twain, this year’s most beguiling best-selling author, but he probably would have expected no less.

Scholars Rediscover Three Forgotten Stories by Zora Neale Hurston

Earlier this week, Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors published an essay on their experiences team-teaching a course on Zora Neale Hurston (who was born 120 years ago today) and Richard Wright. They used the two Library of America editions of Hurston’s writings as their primary texts, but encouraged students to do original research using less-accessible texts and resources. Poking around on their own, Carpio and Sollors unexpectedly rediscovered three forgotten stories by Hurston:

And then one afternoon we were burrowing through what felt like the umpteenth reel of microfilm from the 1920s and early 1930s, a time when Hurston had already published stories but before her first novel came out. Anyone who has used microfilm of newspapers knows how tedious scanning its often blurry print can be. Then Werner stopped. He had come upon a short story by Hurston that neither of us knew about. We kept looking. The next day, we found two more, all from 1927. As we looked into them, we discovered that not one was listed in the bibliography in Robert Hemenway’s biography of Hurston, or included in any collections of her stories that we knew of. Even more surprising, the stories were set in the New York City of the Harlem Renaissance; they reminded us less of the canonical Hurston than of authors like Rudolph Fisher and Nella Larsen, who are more closely associated with stories of migration from the country to the city and with sophisticated novels of manners in urban settings.

From: “The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 2, 2011)

The two scholars note that the existence of these three stories—and there may well be others—shows that it’s not entirely correct to view Hurston through the prism of her later focus on rural black life. “They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author . . . Hurston’s urban period reminds us that she was a central player in the Harlem Renaissance—but also one of its fiercest critics.”

You can also view recently discovered footage filmed by Zora Neale Hurston during one of her research trips to Florida in 1928. More information about this film can be read here.

Related LOA volumes: Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings

Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928

Harlem World recently posted a video containing footage recorded by Zora Neale Hurston during one of her research trips to Florida in 1928. (Update: You can view the footage at the PBS site.) Before—and even after—she became known as a novelist and story writer, Hurston actively pursued many ethnographic research programs. She graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in anthropology in 1927 and spent several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s collecting and performing folksongs reflecting black culture in her native Florida for the Federal Writers Project (WPA). About these early films, Harlem World notes:

[Hurston] used the loan of a camera to photograph fifteen reels of film preserving the heritage of southern African-American culture. Of these reels, only nine are known to have survived and contain black & white, occasionally grainy footage capturing children at play, a baptism in a river, a logging camp, and footage of octogenarian Cudjo Lewis, the final survivor from The Clotilde, the last arriving slave ship to America (in 1859). No intertitles are presented with these clips, although the musical accompaniment is comprised of spirituals and bluegrass music.

Travel expenses and the cost of the camera were provided by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy and controversial patron of Hurston, Langston Hughes, and the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Mason also funded the research behind Hurston’s first work of nonfiction Mules and Men (1935). The University of Virginia Crossroads website offers additional insights into this troublesome patron–artist relationship as well as additional material about the creation of Mules and Men.

The Library of America volume Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings includes the complete text of Mules and Men and features the original illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias.

Other related LOA works: Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories; True Crime: An American Anthology (includes Hurston's "The Trial of Ruby McCollum")