My book club members were wondering if we could find a list of the top books from New York Times best sellers BY YEAR.

I can find lists by date, but I haven't found a comprehensive list by year.

Do you know of such a list?

Thanks!

Susan

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Hi Susan

I see what you mean. It seems that it's easy to find the lists by week going back to when they started in the 40s, e.g. at http://www.hawes.com/pastlist.htm

But there doesn't seem to be a bestseller list for each year as a whole. Although - as you've probably already discovered, the NYT, like virtually every publication, does opine on the 'best books' of each year. For example this list shows their top recommendations for 2010:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/10-best-books-of-2010.html
And if you look on the left you'll see links to previous years.

The best alternative I can think of is Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers lists. They usually report two ways - how many weeks a book was in their bestseller charts; and also how many copies publishers report selling.

If you google something like "site:www.publishersweekly.com 2010 bestsellers" you should come up with http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/45712-bestsellers-10-the-year-in-bestsellers.html

(hint by putting site:www.publishersweekly.com at the start of the search the results will show only pages on publishersweekly.com)

A similar search for 2009 brought up http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20090323/1686-bestselling-books-2009-hardcover-old-and-new-.html

The catch is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of standardization to how the information is reported from one year to another, nor is there a central page with links to past years - so it might be too much work and/or information overload if you're just looking to glance at the top 10 for each year!

Hope that helps. Has anyone got any better suggestions?

Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!!

The hawes site is a HUGE help since it had a link to books that had been "number one" by year, title and author.

Have a great day!

Susan

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