Booksellers are bombarded daily with new arrivals, review copies and advance uncorrected proofs. The consequence, which nobody outside the trade expects, is that they forget books they read and loved eighteen months ago, because six hundred more have crossed the counter since.
The store's answer was an exercise it ran periodically: every bookseller compiled a baker's dozen — thirteen — of their favourite books read in the previous twelve years. Not the year's best. Not the ones they were currently selling. The thirteen that had stuck. As several of them complained at the time, it was not an easy feat.
The individual booksellers are not named in this archive. The lists are described as a practice.
What a twelve-year list looks like
The results were nothing like a bestseller chart, and that is the interesting part. A typical list carried a couple of literary heavyweights, a book of poetry, at least one children's classic in a particular illustrated edition, a big work of narrative non-fiction, a history nobody had heard of, and one wholly unclassifiable object — a reference volume, an art book, a photographic survey of the earth from the air.
Three patterns showed up across every list:
- Children's books held their place among adult ones. Not on a separate list, not as a concession — sitting in the top thirteen alongside the Pulitzer winners. Booksellers who spend their lives around children's literature rate the best of it as literature, and they are right.
- Illustrated editions were specified. A list would not just name a classic; it would name which illustrator's edition. That is a bookseller's distinction, invisible to a database, and it is often the difference between a book that gets read and one that sits.
- Very little of it was new. In a trade organised entirely around the next six weeks of publishing, the books people actually kept were mostly five, ten and twenty years old.
Why the format works
A twelve-year list is a better recommendation instrument than a seasonal one for the obvious reason: time has done the filtering. Every book on it has survived several hundred subsequent books competing for the same shelf in the same head. It is the closest thing a working bookshop produces to a considered judgement.
It also worked commercially, in a quiet way. A customer looking at thirteen books chosen over twelve years by a named person with a known specialism is being offered something no chart can offer — coherence. The lists were explicitly aimed at book groups looking for a next title and at readers wanting something for a cold night.
The other lists
This sat alongside the store's rotating staff picks, which were current and seasonal; the customer recommendations, written by readers; and the Pick of the Literate subject bibliographies. Between them the shop published four distinct kinds of recommendation, each with a different time-horizon and a different authority behind it — which is a more sophisticated apparatus than most retailers of any size manage.
Try it
The exercise is worth doing on your own shelves, and it is harder than it sounds. Thirteen books from twelve years, no rereads of childhood favourites unless you genuinely reread them as an adult, no books included because they look good on a list. Most people find they cannot fill thirteen slots honestly, which is itself informative.
For a comparison point at national scale, the National Book Foundation maintains the complete history of the National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature record covers a century and a quarter of the same question asked differently.