The story of Alice Walker's rise to bestsellerdom emphasizes how the literary star system selects and tokenizes particular works while ignoring others.

Finally, as Astbury comments, libraries would claim to contribute the critical component in the market, to provide the counterweight to bestsellerdom, and to contribute substantially to sustaining a wide range of serious books.

His quiet, humorous backwoods manner also makes him intriguingly unmodern, a figure who has wandered not out of late-20th-century bestsellerdom but out of the murder ballads and tall tales of the 1800's.

So, after H. Norman Schwarzkopf rocketed himself and publisher Bantam Books to 25 weeks of bestsellerdom with "It Doesn't Take A Hero," another Gulf War commander, Colin L. Powell, last week gave Random House world rights to his autobiography for a reported $6.5 million.