Any public library system--like AFPL--that makes only lukewarm efforts to
meet the needs of its customers who patronize the library only to read
the latest bestselling novel jeopardizes one of its most stalwart sources
of support. Serving this constituency well has always been a priority
for library administrators at successful public libraries.
Be that as it may, probably every librarian has wondered at times about whether
or not all the effort--not to mention all the tax dollars--expended on linking these
patrons to the "literature" they so rabidly pursue is worth it all:
"According to Publishers Weekly, the best-selling books of the 1940s included
books by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill, Pearl
S. Buck, Richard Wright, and W. Somerset Maugham. As late as the 1970s, these
names made the best-sellers list: Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, John Updike,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Styron. In
the 1990s, however, forty-one of the fifty best-selling books of the decade were written
by these six authors: John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Michael Chrichton,
Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark."
Source: Philip Yancey, quoted in Indelible Ink edited by Scott Larsen
(Waterbrook Press, 2003), page xi-xii
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