Best-Sellers

Seventy-five years ago this July, Georgia readers read with apoplectic rage a new book called A Residence on a Georgian Plantation, the devastating abolitionist journal of Fanny Kemble, famous English actress who abandoned the stage on her U. S. tour to marry a wealthy Georgia plantation owner named Pierce Butler. No Southern writer has ever said a good word for Fanny Kemble. But last week, in Davison-Paxon's book department in Atlanta, Ga., Margaret Armstrong's Fanny Kemble, a sympathetic and excellent biography of this colorful Victorian, outsold all other titles. Elsewhere it crowded the leading non-fiction best-seller The Importance of Living, and with other serious books selling widely, contradicted the theory that summer readers go in for only light fiction. That they buy fewer books, however, was clearly indicated by U. S. booksellers' figures, which showed a drop of as much as 50% in some Southern bookshops.

Although Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling continued to hold top place, at month's end it was losing ground to Howard Spring's My Son, My Son!, seemed sure to be supplanted. Crowding both was Nordhoff & Hall's The Dark River, called by booksellers a "one-month" bestseller. Possibly Kenneth Roberts' Trending Into Maine should be considered in the same category. At any rate. success in Pittsburgh and Boston made Author Roberts the only U. S. author of the year to have two books on best-seller lists.

As reported by leading booksellers throughout the country, July's best-sellers were, in order of sales: THE YEARLING--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings--Scribner ($2.50).

MY SON, MY SON!--Howard Spring-- Viking ($2.50).

THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING--Lin Yu-tang--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

THE DARK RIVER--Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall -- Little, Brown ($2.50).

FANNY KEMBLE--Margaret Armstrong --Macmillan ($3).

TRENDING INTO MAINE--Kenneth Roberts--Little, Brown ($4).

THE CITADEL--A. J. Cronin--Little, Brown ($2.50).

THE MORTAL STORM--Phillis Bottome --Little, Brown ($2.50).

NORTHWEST PASSAGE--Kenneth Roberts--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

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