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from the and-now-for-something-completely-different dept.
Spotted on HackerNews is a link to the story of I, Libertine, a book which made the New York Times Bestseller List despite its non-existence following a hoax co-ordinated by Jean "Shep" Shepherd in the 1950's.
...here's the thing: in Shep's time, despite its name, the criteria for making the list involved more than just book sales. It included customer requests for and questions about books to book sellers. So if a retailer had a stack of a particular book that wasn't selling, he could gin up enough queries about it to get the title included on the best seller list, which then made people go out and buy it.
Shep saw through this hypocrisy and ranted about it at length one night. In a burst of inspiration, he speculated that if enough people requested the same title of a book that didn't actually exist, it could indeed make the coveted New York Times Best Seller List.
...
by early summer 1956, the book that didn't exist made The New York Times Best Seller List ... and kept inching upward on it. One literary gossip columnist even wrote in a leading newspaper, "Had a delightful lunch the other day with Frederick R. Ewing and his charming wife, Marjorie."And the whole time this was going on, Shep and his Night People listeners were laughing themselves silly. There was never any secret to it; it was a hoax openly discussed and pulled off right on the public airwaves.
Original HackerNews discussion thread.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday August 03 2015, @05:52AM
Ah - good point, and I should probably have cut a bit more of the section quoted which does need the context. My Bad.
"Frederick R. Ewing" was the author of the fake book, and also did not exist. The relevant bit of TFA:
(Score: 3, Insightful) by skater on Monday August 03 2015, @11:18AM
I was able to infer that fact from the context, but I think inferences are a lost art these days.