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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21362, 3 June 1939, Page 12

What is the most interesting book you have ever read? Last year the American Institute of Public Opinion put that question to readers of all classes in every part of the United States, and the following list of America’s favourite books has been drawn up:—The Bible, “Gone With the Wind,” “Anthony Adverse,” “The Citadel,” “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “The Good Earth,” “Ben Hur,” “North-West Passage,” “Little Women,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Les Miserables,” “Magnificent Obsession” (Lloyd Douglas), “Tom Sawyer,” "Treasure Island,” “Count of Monte Cristo,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Ivanhoe,” “The Green Light” (Lloyd Douglas), “David Copperfield,” “Call of the Wild."

Commenting on this list, which is arranged in order of popularity, Mr George Gallup, the institute’s director, says that nearly one voter in five named the Bible—but 94 per cent of these votes came from people over 30, which suggests that interest in the Bible is sharply declining. Indeed, reckoning women’s votes only, it was displaced last year from the head of trte list by “Gone With the Wind.” Mr Gallup points out that eight of the 19 runners-up were published in the last few years, and the rest, with one exception, before 1900. What then has happened to the best-sellers of 1900-30? The names that mean most to us in the American literature of tii’e ’twenties—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, Willa Gather, Thornton Wilder—are not even represented. It is significant, though, that several of the books listed, and all the classics, have been given wide publicity as the basis of popular films. Mr Gallup has no doubt about the extent of the cinema’s influence on readers. He recalls that when “David Copperfield" was produced the public library authorities of Cleveland ordered 125 extra copies of the book, raising their total stock to 500 copies. And every one of them was in demand, both during and immediately after the run of the fllml