What are the most popular books sold at book stalls in New York City? More Intelligent Life investigates.
From the piece...
My first discovery was that the four areas showed a curious mixture of consistency and variety. By Columbia, I found Saint Augustine’s “Confessions” and Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse”. One of the stallholders, Adhemar Ahmad, explained that he was “trying to sell to the professors”. By contrast in Williamsburg, a painfully fashionable neighbourhood of vegan restaurants and skinny denim, I found voguish titles by the comic essayist David Sedaris. One vendor there, outside a newsagent stocked with magazines like Wound and Flaunt, also had a hefty pile of new-age literature.
After I had tallied all the stalls, a weekend spent in the company of Microsoft Excel transformed my notes into a spreadsheet of the most abundant titles and authors.
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