The Spy Comes into the Drugstore

The best-seller, like the camera, said Wyndham Lewis, cannot lie. Week after week the best-seller lists, installments of a psychic fever-chart, detail the reading-matter a determining number of people feel they must have badly enough to shell out, say, the price of a fix of heroin. And when, like a legalized narcotic, such a book as The Group turns up finally in the nation’s drugstores, then the best-seller lists, which monitor only hardcover sales, know it no more.

So when John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, after more than a year of best-sellerdom, lingered obstinately among the Top Ten at $4.50 for a full three weeks after the drugstore package had become available at 75¢, the most inexpert diagnostician could guess that some supplementary law was deflecting the normal equilibrium of supply and demand.

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Hugh Kenner

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The best-seller, like the camera, said Wyndham Lewis, cannot lie. Week after week the best-seller lists, installments of a psychic fever-chart, detail the reading-matter a determining number of people feel they must have badly enough to shell out, say, the price of a fix of heroin. And when, like a legalized narcotic, such a book as The Group turns up finally in the nation’s drugstores, then the best-seller lists, which monitor only hardcover sales, know it no more.

So when John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, after more than a year of best-sellerdom, lingered obstinately among the Top Ten at $4.50 for a full three weeks after the drugstore package had become available at 75¢, the most inexpert diagnostician could guess that some supplementary law was deflecting the normal equilibrium of supply and demand.