ABSTRACT
In 1996 Waterstones the booksellers asked their customers to vote for the hundred books which they thought would outlast the century. The list they finally published contained classics, from Virginia Woolf's To the Light House (1927) to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), books which had made the news such as Peter Wright's Spycatcher (1987) and Stephen Hawking's ABrief History of Time (1988), and some bestsellers such as Richard Adams' Watership Down (1972) and Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course (1982). Yet there were so me striking omissions: where, for instance, were the crime novels of Agatha Christie? Books which had sold in their millions world-wide and been read and reread by thousands of readers. 'Classics' in their own right but not, apparently, in the sense the public understood the term. Waterstones' list showed the critics just how far apart the public's taste and the public's actual reading habits were. What readers recommended, or thought good enough to outlast the century, was quite different from what they were actually reading.
