groanup, do you know when the NYT Nonfiction Paperback bestseller list was started? The NYT Hardcover lists started in 1942. Sometime in the 60's or early 70's paperbacks gained some level of respectability and the NYT added a Mass-Market Paperback category, and at some point later a Trade Paperback category. These distinctions between mass-market and trade were related to point of purchase and not related to fiction or non-fiction status. (since mass market books are sold outside of bookstores in large quantities and the previous list was almost all bookstores).
Sometime after 1980, they went to the Paperback Fiction and Paperback Nonfiction they use now.
Here is an excerpt for NYT in 1981 re 1980 book sales:
Published: January 18, 1981
The year-end figures have been toted up, and the news seems to be good. The overall holiday sales, booksellers report, were up 12 to 20 percent over the same period in 1979.
Also, the relationship of the sales of hardcover general best sellers to fiction - the former usually outsell the latter by 12 to 15 percent - was maintained. The lists this week represent the start of an inter-season waiting period -no new titles, no dramatic changes. ''The Official Preppy Handbook'' is outperforming the next title on the trade paperback list two to one. ''The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet,'' by the late Dr. Tarnower, is off all lists for the first time in two years. (It was a hardcover best seller for a year, and, when it dropped from that list, instantly appeared on the mass paperback list, where it also stayed for a year.)
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Note that the scarsdale diet is on the mass paperback list even though it is non-fiction.
So, Boortz's claim of the highest paperback book debut for over forty years is even more ludicrous since the nonfiction paperback list hasn't even been around for forty years.
Note that they also added a Paperback Advice (How-To and Misc) category at some point further diluting the value of the nonfiction book list (since these advice books are also nonfiction).
You've really gone off the deep end with the newspaper list haven't you, Robbie? Going to make it your life's work to spam all posts with this new vanity nonsense of yours?
Who gives a rat's rear end???