PAST POPULARITY

Shannon News, 3 December 1926, Page 2

PAST POPULARITY

SOME BYGONE BEST SELL ills. % * —rrrrmw The best seller has always been with us, each generation having its own taste in the matter, with the result that a collection of some of the best sellers of the past would make what Lamb called “fine, confused, feeding.” How many read the poems of the Earl of Surrey to-day? In their day, however, they were best sellers, going through four editions in two months, and through seven more within the thirty years following their publication in 1557, besides appearing in broadsides, garlands, arid miscellancies. Sir Phillip Sidney's "Arcadia” was immensely popular when it appeared in 1590, and is credited with having given a greater impulse to the national taste for romantic fiction than any other work before or since: A different type of book was the "Eikon Basilike,” yet its success can only be described in Dominie Sampson’s language as "Prodigious," for it passed through no fewer than forty-seven editions in rapid succession in Britain alone, while numerous editions appeared on the Continent. A Success Which Failed. A few years later and Dryden’s.“Absalom and Achitopel” ranked as a best seller, five editions being called for in a year, but while "the effect it produced was unprecedented,” it failed in Its immediate object—-to prejudice the public against Shaftesbury, then awaiting trial. Later, again, the success of the “Beggar’s Opera” is said to have been unprecedented and almost incredible. Not only did it make Gay rich and Rich gay, hut the favourite songs were inscribed on ladies’ handkerchiefs and on household screens.

Political pamphlets and histories have also been numbered amongst best Swift’s “Conduct of the Allies” pleased one generation so Imuch that *it bought up four large editions in a week, and a later generation bought of Burke’s “Reflections oh the French Revolution” seven thousand copies in six days. It has been estimated that more, than thirty thousand copies were sold in a few years. Best-Selling Literature. Gibbon says in his “Autobiography” that he was at a loss how to describe the success of his History without be traying the vanity of the historian. The first impression was exhausted in a few days, and other two editions scarcely equalled the deaaand. Still more popular to another generation was Macaulay’s “History,” of which two hundred thousand copies were sold in three months. At least one volume of sermons has been elevated to the rank of a best seller. The “Astronomical Discourses” of Dr. Chalmers ran to mile editions within a year, a record, by the way, for book of the kind. Published almost contemporaneously with the “Tales of My Landlord,” it was equally as much sought after. Indeed, several curious observers are said to have been struck with the novel competition, and watched with lively interest the almost neck-and-neck race for u year between Scotland's great novelist and her greatest preacher.