Via e-mail, I've seen the new New York Times bestseller list (the one that will appear here next Monday and in the Sunday paper the week after that). Yeah, Hillary's still #1, obviously. Sidney Blumenthal's back on the main list, at #15. In fiction, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen's Gettysburg plummets from #12 to #28. Obviously, the Gingrichistas all went out and bought that one the first week, and most other people are giving it a miss.

A lot of people rushed out to buy Hillary's book the first week, too -- the Nielsen BookScan numbers Drudge cites show a dropoff (168,676 recorded sales in week #2, as opposed to 438,701 in week #1). But that's a dropoff from rather phenomenal to merely extraordinary. And BookScan, as I noted a few days ago, misses a lot of book sales in this country (its coverage was 65% according to this May 2002 article and probably isn't much higher now). (Daisy Maryles, in Publishers Weekly, which reports to the trade, said there were "estimated sales of about 600,000 in the book's first week on sale" and added that she "believes that it's the fastest-selling adult hardcover....Simon & Schuster has done seven printings thus far, with about 1.6 million copies in print." Lucianne Goldberg is free to differ.)

"The average nonfiction book sells about five thousand copies, and a best-seller is generally one that sells thirty thousand copies or more." --Ann Coulter, Slander, pp. 97-98

Heh-heh.

(Oh -- Off with Their Heads, the new, GOP-friendly book by the embittered Dick Morris, is, alas, also on the list, at #11. I wonder if that one will be a one-week phenomenon, like Newt's book.)