Patrick Leigh Fermor happyslapped in the Amazon rankings – Telegraph Blogs

Saturday 31 January 2015 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Christopher Howse

Christopher Howse writes leaders and features and reviews for The Daily Telegraph, which he joined in 1996 as obituaries editor. His Saturday column, Sacred Mysteries, is on religion. He lives in Westminster.

Patrick Leigh Fermor happyslapped in the Amazon rankings

Patrick Leigh Fermor has been pipped on Amazon by Karl Pilkington

Patrick Leigh Fermor has been pipped on Amazon by Karl Pilkington

There has been a row in the TLS based on the ranking of books on Amazon. In a letter to the journal, the colourful historian Norman Stone attacked Colin Imber, the author of an "enraged" review of his latest book.

Professor Stone's parting shot was the dismissive remark: "I wonder whether to bother too much with the strictures of an Imber whose latest book (2009) stands at 1,258,969th place on the Amazon list."

But the American novelist Ursula Le Guin has now chipped in with a warning that it may be "unwise, as well as snide, to cite the low ranking of one’s reviewer on the Amazon sales list".

"The last I looked," she wrote, "Norman Stone’s book was in the 630,000s and Colin Imber’s was running ahead of it in the 620,000s."

Beyond the slap-down, Ursula Le Guin questions the whole notion of Amazon rankings."The volatility of these figures is extreme," she says, "and what they really represent is known only to Amazon.com."

As it happens I have been taking a certain interest in Amazon rankings in the day or so since the publication of a travel book I have written called A Pilgrim in Spain. On Monday it edged ahead of the great Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water, into fifth position in the Travel Writing rankings. Sir Patrick, of course, had made the ultimate sacrifice for his publisher of dying, full of years and glory.

Whatever satisfaction I might have had was mitigated by Leigh Fermor being pushed down to 7th position this morning by Karl Pilkington's agreeably brainless Happyslapped by a Jellyfish.

comments powered by Disqus
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/christopherhowse/100054270/patrick-leigh-fermor-happyslapped-in-the-amazon-rankings/
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-06
57391
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GULPXSFUIN5OC6BW6ZQLTYMKHQ4ZXHLF
<urn:uuid:a32d69ca-a837-4673-8806-1c962a54eb00>
2015-01-31T13:20:04Z
23.0.160.33
sha1:FLCE6RCW57S6RBJX2FW2FGXK3NLDPKJM
<urn:uuid:beba74ff-6aaa-4024-b804-cd7c1fd37ab4>
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/christopherhowse/100054270/patrick-leigh-fermor-happyslapped-in-the-amazon-rankings/
response
<urn:uuid:5d7f0790-58ee-418d-a65d-a47d0cec2879>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-212-252.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-06
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for January 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf