Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Most Borrowed Books in New York City Libraries in 2024
It is one of the greater strangeness of New York City that it’s libraries are more a confederation that an an integrated system, but one interesting effect is that because of this, data is collected by borough, which shows how the different parts of the city do seem to read differently:
Chief Librarian Brian Bannon said he noticed a number of differences in genre preference by borough while scanning NYPL’s list.
“The Bronx is more like thriller, memoir, historical fiction. Manhattan — literary fiction, social contemporary, relationship driven. Queens, I saw fantasy, thriller, diverse voices, and then Staten Island — thriller, family drama, comfort reads.”
The top book overall was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, though in Queens it was The Women and in The Bronx it was The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
Speaking of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it is getting a real-world, multi-pronged marketing campaign in the UK this season, headlined by Magic Eye billboards with secret messages via QR codes in them. (When I was in London and around Scotland in the summer of 2023, the book was featured prominently in almost every bookstore I went in, though during my summer trip this year through Germany and more Eastern Europe, I don’t recall seeing it anywhere.)
This follows a major old-school publicity and marketing push earlier this fall for Intermezzo in the UK. We don’t seem to see these sorts of things in the U.S., and I don’t have a particular good theory about why. Perhaps the centrality of a few cities in the UK to the broader national attention makes real-world promotions like this more powerful? This supposes that they work even over there, I suppose.
It does show, though, the rich-get-richer aspect of marketing books. If a book does well and has gets some awareness, follow-on efforts are easier to justify. Still, a campaign of this complexity and scale for a book that’s been out more than a year is something of a unicorn.
