In October 1958, when Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita and Harry Golden's memoir Only in America were the most popular new books in the U.S., TIME published its first weekly list of bestsellers. Compiled from information provided by bookstores to TIME correspondents in 22 cities, the list was then one of the few to be truly national in scope. It has since become a bestseller in its own right, distributed by the Associated Press to its 1,370 member newspapers. But as the technology of publishing books has advanced, so has the arcane art of counting book sales. With this week's chart--led by Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (fiction) and Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose (nonfiction) --TIME'S bestseller list enters the computer age. The new literary hit parade, product of an extensive study by Books Editor Stefan Kanfer, is based on the most representative sample of U.S. bookstores ever constructed and on retail sales figures for each title, reported to the penny.

Kanfer first turned his attention from print to print-outs more than a year ago, when he asked John P. Dessauer, a leading book industry statistician, how TIME could have the nation's most accurate bestseller list. With advice from the American Booksellers Association, Dessauer devised a sample of some 1,200 stores in cities across the U.S., balanced according to location, type of store and local sales volume. The group includes dozens of independent shops and mini-chains, the two largest U.S. booksellers (B. Dalton and Walden) and one middle-sized national chain (Brentano's). Each participating retailer has RICHARD WOOD agreed to furnish a portion of its weekly sales figures to our data-processing department, which maintains strict confidentiality about the numbers. Dessauer then worked out a formula that assigns a statistical value to each store, reflecting its representative role in the sample. Figures for the two giant chains, for example, are weighted to approximate their actual percentage of total U.S. book sales.

Because it responds more rapidly to fluctuations in readers' tastes, TIME'S new bestseller list is less static than its predecessor. Says Books Assistant Sharon Lauver, who helped coordinate tests of the new method: "Not only do books shift position more frequently, but new titles show up sooner." This week three works appear for the first time. To make such information more readily available to American readers, TIME is furnishing displays of its new bestseller list to bookstores around the U.S. TIME'S readers, of course, need look no further than our Books section.

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