Pump up the volumes

At this peak time for booksellers, reliable crowd-pleasers such as thrillers and memoirs will surely sell briskly, but Robert McCrum has a few lower-profile tomes to suggest

- 

In this season of lists, choosing Christmas presents in a favourite bookshop must rank high on any catalogue of winter’s secret pleasures.

A few weeks ago - reviewing Stephen King’s classic On Writing - when Christmas was still a remote suspicion of tinsel, I reported on the imminent opening of my friend Chloe’s new bookshop on a high street in Hardy’s Wessex. Today’s good news is that, midway between Bath and Salisbury, Fox & King is now open and ready for the first great challenge of any bookseller's year: the Christmas Books Campaign, that annual offensive, with terrible losses in the No Man's Land of British literary culture, where a gruesome roster of wannabe bestsellers are bestowed on aunts, nephews and stray in-laws.

Every year, the statistics repeat the same old story. Thirty per cent of new titles sold per annum in the UK will be traded in this “golden quarter” - October to December. A lucky handful of mega-winners will be matched by desolate platoons of losers - the many new titles that fail to pass muster. Amid the carnage, does this indicate a wider book bonanza? Yes and no.

First, we need to submit any Christmas list to some ageless criteria. In 1886, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette, the young Oscar Wilde declared: “Books today may be conveniently divided into three classes.” There were, he decided, “books to read” and “books to reread”. No argument there. Finally, in an era that “has no time to think”, there were, he said, “books not to read at all”.

His response to this brutal taxonomy was Wildean, pure and simple: “Whosoever will select ‘the Worst 100 Books’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.”