THE
SUNDAY
TIMES
BESTSELLERS
GENERAL HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
Julie Smith
(M Joseph £14.99)
Clinical psychologist’s advice for
navigating life’s ups and downs
(9,020)1132
Springtime at Cannon Hall Farm/The Nicholson
Family (Ebury Spotlight £16.99) A typical springtime
on the TV stars’ South Yorkshire farm (3,345)—13
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Charlie Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (3,105)2 1304
The Storyteller/Dave Grohl
(Simon & Schuster £20) The Nirvana and Foo
Fighters rock star shares stories from his life (1,715)17 145
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £14.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (1,670)4136
Queen of Our Times/Robert Hardman
(Macmillan £20) The life of Queen Elizabeth II,
from her birth in 1926 to the present day (1,630)337
When the Dust Settles/Lucy Easthope
(Hodder £20) Autobiography by one of the UK’s
leading authorities on disaster recovery (1,580)—18
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon/James Norbury
(M Joseph £14.99) Illustrated mindful tale of
friendship, inspired by Buddhist philosophy (1,520)10 219
Burning Questions/Margaret Atwood
(Chatto £20) The two-time Booker winner’s third
collection of essays and occasional pieces (1,395)11 310
Taste/Stanley Tucci
(Fig Tree £20) A gastronomic journey through the
actor’s life in and out of the kitchen (1,365)56GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
Happy Mind, Happy Life
Rangan Chatterjee
(Penguin Life £16.99)
The GP shares cutting-edge insights
into the science of happiness
(14,455)—12
Glucose Revolution/Jessie Inchauspé
(Short £12.99) An analysis of how food affects biology
and tips for taking control of your health (8,260)—13
This Is Going to Hurt/Adam Kay
(Picador £8.99) A doctor turned comedian’s account
of what life was like on the NHS front line (3,530)1 1364
The Full Diet/Saira Hameed
(M Joseph £14.99) NHS doctor’s science-based
advice for sustainable weight loss (3,525)—15
Putin’s People/Catherine Belton
(Wm Collins £9.99) How Putin and his KGB entourage
seized power in Russia and turned on the West (3,445)296
The Comfort Book/Matt Haig
(Canongate £9.99) Aphorisms, stories and
meditations that offer comfort in hard times (3,130)337
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions
that could define global politics in the future (2,885)4278
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (2,630)5 1109
Atomic Habits/James Clear
(Random House £16.99) The minuscule changes
that can grow into life-altering outcomes (2,610)63310
Prisoners of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) Ten maps that tell you
all you need to know about geopolitics (2,070)11 136BOOKS
held to be “the first book ever
printed”, and shows how it
owed a great deal, aesthetically
and organisationally, to
centuries of predecessors.
She looks back to Julius
Caesar’s invention of the
codex, a parchment on which
he sent dispatches to the
Senate, as the first real book,
and finds the poet Martial, an
early adopter, urging his fans
“who want my little books to
keep you company on long
journeys” to “buy these”.
Smith notes that Martial is
an early version of her
publisher, Allen Lane, who
in 1934 stood on the platform
at Exeter station with nothing
to read on the train, dreamt
of a vending machine that
could sell cheap paperbacks
— and invented Penguin
Books in 1935.
This kind of breezy linkage
across centuries is typical of
Smith’s approach. She looks,
for instance, at the history of
book burning and finds that itthat, Cowley. Very cheering.
The history of books as
material objects rather than
repositories of wisdom or
enlightenment is the subject
of Emma Smith’s wildly
entertaining study. In 16
chapters she looks at every
function they have fulfilled:
Bibles that cure snake bites,
ward off devils, guarantee that
defendants will tell the truth
in court and sometimes stop
a bullet; books as weapons
of war (12 million American
Service Editions of 1,300 titles
were sent to entertain troops
in battle in 1942 — they ranged
from The Iliad to Superman
and Lytton Strachey’s waspish
biography Queen Victoria);
books as love tokens, like the
luxurious, silk-bound the
Keepsake annuals, full of
mushy stories and tacky
engravings, that reveal the
lowbrow taste of Ned
Plymdale in Middlemarch.
Smith kicks off with the
1455 Gutenberg Bible, longLITERATURE
John Walsh
Portable Magic A History
of Books and their Readers
by Emma Smith
Allen Lane £20 pp335
When Charles I was in prison
in 1648, awaiting the trial that
would bring his execution, his
son Charles, Prince of Wales,
asked the poet Abraham
Cowley to come round and
cheer him up. The prince
asked if Cowley fancied
playing cards, but Cowley
had a better idea. He had
brought Virgil’s The Aeneid
and suggested they use it to
read the future. The prince
stuck a pin into the closed
pages, opened the book and
read from the paragraph
nearest the pinpoint. It began:
“Let him be vext with a bold
people’s war,/ Exil’d... Die
before his day.” Thanks for
was around long before it was
a byword for Nazi outrage.
Samuel Pepys bought the
notorious 1665 pamphlet
L’Escole des Filles (The School
for Girls) intending to burn it
after reading, so “that it should
not stand in the list of books...
to disgrace them if it should
be found”. (And no one likes
having their porn stash on
display.) According to Thomas
Hardy, the bishop of Wakefield
threw his copy of Jude the
Obscure on the fire in disgust at
the sex and the child suicide.
Smith deals amusingly with
things that were never part of
their authors’ intentions.Finding that the first edition
of Bleak House was serialised
in instalments in 1852–53, she
checks out the advertisements
on the paper wrappers, and
wonders if the advert for the
Siphonia pocket raincoat was
“intended as a practical
antidote to the ‘soft black
drizzle’ and fog which
memorably envelops London”
in the novel’s opening pages.
She discusses the outcry
at the “damage” that the
playwright Joe Orton and
Kenneth Halliwell caused
to books from Islington
public library in 1959. They
removed the dust jackets and
“re-purposed” them with
camp, surreal collages (a
sober photo of Sir John
Betjeman in a straw boater
was replaced by a tattooed,
pot-bellied man sitting in his
underpants). They were given
six months in prison — the
same sentence handed down
to a drunk driver who killed
his passenger. Smith is
outraged by the overestimate
of an easily replaced book as a
valuable object and concludes
that the unspoken charge
at the trial was that
“unsuspecting readers at
Islington Library might havel From Covid to war in
Europe, we’ve been dealing
with our fair share of disasters
recently. Perhaps it’s no
surprise, then, that Lucy
Easthope’s memoir about her
work in disaster recovery
has jumped straight into the
bestsellers list.
l Meanwhile, escapists have
turned to Netflix’s Bridgerton,
based on Julia Quinn’s
historical romance novels.
And viewers have since
flocked to buy The Viscount
Who Loved Me, which
inspired the new series and
is back in the fiction list.
The lists are prepared by and
the data is supplied by (and
copyrighted to) Nielsen BookScan,
and are taken from the TCM for
the week ending 02/04/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
Did she really read Joyce?
Marilyn Monroe’s reading habits, Samuel Pepys’s porn stash and other book stories
Smith’s book
is a wildly
entertaining
study
24 10 April 2022