HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2010

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 16th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5.5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection, which now has over 2,800 titles.

Attention focused on nationalism, race, gender, war, urbanism and media. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remained in first place. Perennial bestseller Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge) moved up to second place from fifth, while Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press) slipped only one notch from second to third place.


Verso had two books in the top ten with City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles joining Imagined Communities. University presses accounted for five of the ten titles, with two from Princeton University Press and one each from University of California Press, NYU Press and Oxford University Press.


In addition to Verso, commercial presses in the top ten included Pantheon, Schocken and Routledge.

Considering the changing nature of humanistic scholarship, it is interesting to note that many of these titles are older works: Imagined Communities is a revised edition (2006) of a work originally published in 1983. Of the remaining nine titles, seven are ten or more years old, with two from the 1980s and four from the 1990s.

And here’s the list:

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983, 2006)
2. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006)
4. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
5. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986)
6. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
7. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005)
8. Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000)
9. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
10. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken, 1995)