1953

US Fiction

1. The Robe, Lloyd C. Douglas 487 copies on LT

2. The Silver Chalice, Thomas B. Costain 243 copies

3. Désirée, Annemarie Selinko 123 copies

4. Battle Cry, Leon M. Uris 138 copies

5. From Here to Eternity, James Jones 302 copies

6. The High and the Mighty, Ernest K. Gann 29 copies

7. Beyond This Place, A. J. Cronin 33 copies

8. Time and Time Again, James Hilton 18 copies

9. Lord Vanity, Samuel Shellabarger 29 copies

10. The Unconquered, Ben Ames Williams 6 copies

N O N F I C T I O N

1. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version 107 copies specific to this edition

2. The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale 366 copies

3. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Alfred C. Kinsey, et al. 44 copies

4. Angel Unaware, Dale Evans Rogers 47 copies

5. Life Is Worth Living, Fulton J. Sheen 19 copies

6. A Man Called Peter, Catherine Marshall 227 copies

7. This I Believe, Edward P. Morgan, editor; Edward R. Murrow, foreword 63 copies

8. The Greatest Faith Ever Known, Fulton Oursler and G.A.O. Armstrong 30 copies

9. How to Play Your Best Golf, Tommy Armour 15 copies

10. A House Is Not a Home: The True Story of America's Most Famous Madam, Polly Adler 16 copies

Wicked red touchstones today. This is an interesting list. Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale died just this week at the age of 101 and was credited with saving The Power of Positive Thinking from the trash after it was rejected by multiple publishers.

I got nothing on this one.

Wow -- I've heard of many of these, but the only ones I've read are Time and Time Again and A Man Called Peter.

From here to Eternity was one of the first "realistic" book to come out about WW2. James Jones became an instant celebrity. His battle scenes gave all the gory details & he used real "swear words" except for the "F word" which shocked a lot of people but started a trend. Leon Uris's Battle Cry was upstaged by Jones' realism. Uris became more realistic in his later works. I can't remember what happened to James Jones. Norman Mailer took over as the leading realist of WW2 & every thing there-after.

>5 Jargoneer: - Norman Mailer couldn't take over from Jones as the leading realist of WWII as he already held that position - The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, significantly before From Here to Eternity.

There is a certain poignancy in a book at No.10 having no copies at all in LT.

# 6
There are actually 6 copies in LT of The Unconquered. Some combining work needed to be done on the author page.

I think, howver, that there are bestsellers from before 1930 that have no owners on LT. But, a goodly proportion of the medium and big libraries in the U.S. have copies of these books, particularly at the university level.

It's interesting that six of the non-fiction sellers had some sort of religious theme. I remember when Fulton Sheen had a television show. And my mother gave me Norman Vincent Peale's book to me at least twice in my life.

#8 And two from the fiction section: The Robe and The Silver Chalice. Both of which I read and loved back in the late 50s! :)

Well. I have 4 from this year that I was born (secret's out!)

The Silver Chalice
Time and Time Again
The Holy Bible Revised Standard Edition
A Man Called Peter

Time and Time Again is mine, the 3 others I inherited from my mother-in-law.

I haven't read any of these

I read From Here to Eternity as outside reading in high school and wrote a final exam essay on it. We had gotten a list of possible outside reading, but I asked if I could read From Here to Eternity, which was not on the list. My teacher said OK. For the final exam, we had to write an essay comparing the protagonist of our outside book with Huck Finn, which we had read as a class. The question was "What would the protagonist of your book have done had he found himself in Huck Finn's situation, and what would Huck Finn have done in your protagonist's situation." It's no surprise that I still remember that little puzzle, these 36 years later. High school English class. Good times! That was Mr. Krasner, one of the very best teachers I ever had in my life.