“This month we are sharing our Top 40 list and have a display of the hot-selling titles from last year. I have an increasingly cranky view of this yearly exercise. It seems that all the press, media, blogosphere is focused on telling us what is most popular. What’s cool, what’s now, what everybody else is doing.
I take particular joy in those customers that dig into our corners and come to the counter to buy an odd copy of the The Georgian Bawdyhouse, or My Fifty Years in Seattle’s Medical Dental Building, or Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine—all of which sold in that bubbly month of December. We have 20,000 titles in our ol’ cedar-lined chest of a bookstore. Come dig for treasure. Find your own fun.”—Roger Page, Owner and Bookseller, Island Books, Mercer Island, WA
Crankiness aside, here’s Island’s Top 40 Bestsellers list for 2012.