Amazon has one, as do Waterstone’s and the Richard & Judy Book Club. There’s now even a website, www.noveltracker.com , that updates figures and positions of the bestselling books every hour. All will have recorded Delia Smith’s latest cookbook on its way to becoming the fastest-selling title ever. We are fascinated by these charts, but there was a time, not so long ago, when we had none at all.

On April 21, 1974,and in this place (The Sunday Times Review, as it then was), the UK’s first definitive weekly national bestseller list was published.Keeping a finger on the nation’s reading pulse in this way had been routine in America since the 1890s. Americans loved their bestseller lists. Why? Because US society is organised around winners and losers. The UK loathed bestseller lists. Why? Because they were unEnglish. Books, we believed, did not compete against each other. Paying attention to a book not for its quality but for the quantity it sold was Yankee philistinism.

The Sunday Times resolved to change all that. It was, historically, the right time to do so. The early 1970s was an era of change, much of it painful. The IRA was blowing up everything that didn’t have a shamrock painted on it. “Who governs Britain?” asked the prime minister, Ted Heath, plaintively from his bunker at No 10. We had a three-day week, energy cuts, double-digit inflation. Times Newspapers, which had dared to embrace technological pro-cesses marginally more advanced than William Caxton’s, was at war with the print unions.

Amid this social turmoil, Harold Evans, an arrant Americanophile, had been appointed editor with a new-broom remit. Photocomposition (as it was called) was one swish of his broom. With another, he put the computer whizz Peter Harland in charge of “new technology” and charged him with setting up a books bestseller list.

Publishers were implacably hostile. And, although it may have been the right historical moment to introduce the lists, it was jumping the gun technologically. Harland was obliged to work from the retail end, laboriously monitoring, by telephone, weekly sales in 300 bookshops, with elaborate checks to prevent the corrupt practices (payola) that infected the pop charts. Crunching the numbers on paper in the few hours available was a formidable challenge. Networked computers would, within 10 years, make it child’s play. In spring 1974, however, those computers were still science fiction.

The Observer got wind of what Harland was up to and promptly bought rights to the fortnightly listing distributed with Gee’s Booksellers’ Newsletter. So Harland and Evans rushed out their first list on April 21, 1974. The pros and cons of bestsellerism were argued, furiously, for weeks thereafter. Would not the inherent commercialism in any bestseller list taint the choice of books reviewed? The Observer dropped its fortnightly charts in January 1975, citing “lack of variety” and the banality of “all thosetelevision-based books”. The Sunday Times lists, meanwhile, went from strength to strength, triggering a seismic shift in the way books were created, distributed, reviewed and - most important - consumed.

The weekly lists sounded the death knell for the Net Book Agreement, the century-old retail price-maintenance regulation that decreed no book could be sold for more or less than the publisher’s posted amount. It was the NBA that preserved what was called the “carriage trade” ethos of the traditional bookshop: the presiding atmosphere of gentility that the patron (never “the customer”) felt on going into any high-street bookshop in the country.

So, who was right? The old guard or the new radicals, who believed books would thrive, like everything else, in an ethos of free enterprise, discounting, competition and numerical clarity? One way of answering the question is to look at what, according to the lists, the nation was reading in 1974 and in December 2007. Have standards gone downhill?

In hardback nonfiction, two titles dominated the 1974 list: America by Alistair Cooke and The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Both were BBC publications, and both were linked to primetime television series of a highly uplifting kind. Cooke and Bronowski were, along with the historian AJP Taylor and the art critic “Lord Clark of Civilis-ation”, as Private Eye dubbed him, what the Victorians called sages: wise men. One felt a better person for watching these series. In fact, one half expected a graduation certificate when they concluded.

Switch to 2007 (my figures are from The Sunday Times end-of-year charts, December 16 and 23, 2007). The equivalent top-selling hardback nonfiction is On the Edge by Richard Hammond; and, in the guides and manuals category, Nigella Express is at No 2 and Jamie at Home at No 3 (behind Guinness World Records 2008 at No 1). Whatever one’s regard for the pleasures of the belly and the open road, it’s hard not to deduce a decline in national seriousness. Would The Ascent of Woman, produced by Bronowski’s daughter, Lisa Jardine, hit the No 1 spot today and recruit the same mass audience figures as the television programme? One doubts it. We are less self-improvingly earnest than we were 30 years ago - not necessarily a bad thing.

In fiction, the top-selling hardback title in 1974, as The Sunday Times recorded, was Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, with Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s Early Cases at No 6. In paperback fiction, the runaway bestseller was Richard Adams’s Watership Down. In the April 1974 lists, Iris Murdoch made an appearance, for a week or two, with The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. (One suspects that buyers confused it with Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine, a much steamier kettle of fish.)

In 2007, the top hardback fiction title was Terry Pratchett’s Making Money, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows way ahead of the pack in the children’s hardback chart. The top-selling paperback novel was The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Ruben-feld, a classy thriller by a Yale lawyer, with Freud and Jung playing lead roles. Fortifying the class element, Ian McEwan comes in at No 5 with Atonement.

When the bestseller list was introduced in 1974, there were two main fears. One was that the lists would corrode discriminating choice. Readers would buy books for no other reason than that “everyone, but everyone, is reading it”. The second was Americanisation.

America would swallow up its UK competitor by industrial conglomeration, then dump its inferior, mass-produced wares on us. Bestsellerism would accelerate that downward slide.

Neither fear has been fulfilled. The British book trade and the British book have more than held their own. Nor, on the evidence of what we buy most of, have our reading standards declined. Sharon Osbourne is there, but so is Irène Némirovsky. And, as any book person will tell you, by cross-subsidy, big sellers pay for smaller ones: we have more of both varieties in 2007. Whatever your verdict on JK Rowling, Harry Potter mania demonstrates the most hopeful sign of all - young people are reading. Madly.

There is another area in which bestseller listing has had a huge and wholly beneficial effect. Together with computer-driven production and electronic point-of-sale feedback, the whole circuit of the book, from the author’s first keystroke to sale (whether e-sale or walk-in), has become ultra-streamlined. Nowhere is the surveillance society more efficient than in the bookshop. The complex machinery by which The Sunday Times bestseller lists are worked out is indicated at the foot of page 38 in this section.

In terms of precision and accuracy, the making of bestseller lists is magnitudes more efficient than it was when Evans and Harland made their breakthrough in 1974. Yet with this efficiency have come new skewings and distortions. Retail selling, since the abolition of the NBA, has become both cannier and more coercive. Go into Waterstone’s and what catches your eye? The glistening array of new bestsellers at the front of the store or the dusty-shelved volumes at the back? Which are you more likely to buy? Publishers are aware of these merchandising pressures. Hence the fact that they are prepared to pay, substantially, for hot spots on the floor, in the window or in those front-of-store dump bins. Self-fuelling circuits are created: a novel gets the No 1 spot on the ST list and goes into a prominent shelf position in the shop (or on Amazon).

This weekly feedback is, however, an integral and irreversible component of the book trade. We shall never return to a world without bestseller lists. And that machinery will become ever more subtle. There is one big payoff, literally, for the consumer. Books have become, in real terms, half as expensive as they were in 1974.

The experiment, in short, has worked. And, admit it, bestseller lists are fun. Who doesn’t love a horse race, even if it’s only (for the good-fiction derby) McEwan v Amis or (for the big-gob cup) Osbourne v Clarkson?

John Sutherland is the author of Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction, published by OUP

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