Hi, Brian Lairer here.

Up next, Brian Lairor Weekend,

three of our favorite segments from the week,

packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend.

So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m.

on WNYC and WNYC.org.

Thank you. Brian Laird on WNYC.

Now we continue our Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, today. Thing number 96,

bestsellers, a decade-by-decade look at what books Americans were reading and what that might say about American culture over the century.

To talk about this, we're joined by Tina Jordan, deputy editor of the New York

Times Book Review and co-editor of the New York Times Book Review 125 years of literary history. She's

pulled out some selections from the lists for us to talk about. Tina, thanks so much for doing

this with us. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you.

This is my pleasure. This is something I'm really interested in. So is 125 years the length of time

that the Times has had a bestseller list? Actually, the Times really started tracking book sales in 1851, the first year of its publication.

And I have to say, it was a little haphazard. They would just send reporters out to bookstores,

and, you know, especially at holiday time. And they would literally print articles what these

correspondents found. The book review

itself was founded in 1896, and it did start running a list at that point. It plucked it from a

literary journal, and again, I don't think it was actually data-driven. It was correspondence going out to bookstores in various cities.

You know, that's as good a job as they could do.

Yeah, shoe leather, old-fashioned journalism.

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