Weekly Bestsellers, 16 July

(Note that NYT’s own online list this week indicates this as week 48 — presumably because they discount the four times in the past year the book ranked below 15th place, the cut-off for the lists published in the print edition. Locus Online is more generous, compiling all rankings posted on the extended online lists.)

This is the 51st week for the book on the Publishers Weekly list, but that’s only because PW skipped a week, on June 11, 2012, apparently in a hiccup with posting their new lists derived from Nielsen BookScan.

It’s ranked on Amazon.com for 72 weeks, counting pre-publication sales, which is why the table below shows that number.

Is this any kind of record? Locus Online‘s database of bestseller rankings, which goes back to Feb. 16, 2003, reveals 21 other titles that have ranked more weeks on a NYT list — but these are all children’s/YA books or paperback editions, with just one exception, Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, which ranked on the fiction hardcover list for 76 consecutive weeks from 5/20/2008 to 10/27/2009, then came back for five more weeks from 12/15/2009 to 1/12/2010, a total of 81 weeks. The all-time champ, at least since 2003, is the trade paperback of Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, with 116 times on the children’s paperback list. (J.K. Rowling does not rank highly in this analysis, because NYT stopped tracking her individual titles fairly early on in their reigns, creating a separate children’s series books list instead.)