Word: hackett
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...outcome of all this is about as predictable as the benumbing succession of autopomorphic gags. Connoisseurs of camp may enjoy watching Tomlinson ranting at the Volkswagen, but The Love Bug is surely the first film in which the actors (Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett) are so meticulously insipid that a car can handily steal the show...
Then the film changes bosses in mid-screen and Will Penny turns standard after all: Civilized Woman Tames Frontier Man. The formula female (prettily played by Joan Hackett) has a formula little boy, and the threesome winsomely provide the formula scenes-the nursing-his-wounds idyl, the making-him-take-a-bath episode, the surrogate father bit. It is an immense relief when Donald Pleasence turns up as the maniac bad guy with an interest in rape and torture...
This newly updated compilation of titles and statistics by Alice Payne Hackett, an editor of the trade magazine Publisher's Weekly, gives a highly useful perspective on the long-range trends beyond the weekly ups and downs, and also includes such items as dictionaries and cookbooks, which the weekly compilations omit. The volume shows how the paperback and population explosions have altered the bestseller concept. A really warm item in 1904 was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which so far has sold 1.4 million copies, nearly all of them in hard cover (it is still in print). Forever Amber...
...Miss Hackett's accounting emphasizes that there is a Gutenberg Fallacy lurking in bookdom's galaxy. To begin with, something that looks like a book and is sold in a bookstore is not necessarily a book. It could be a nonbook, or as Miss Hackett would say, a "nonreading" book. A lifelong career woman in the book business, she thus distinguishes between reading books and nonreading books much as an alcoholic or a barman would describe bourbon and branch water as a drink and Metrecal as a non-drink-liquid food, perhaps. In any event, the nonreading category...
...curious year for literature, as well as economics, was 1929, when four works of immutable quality failed to make Miss Hackett's Big Board: two masterworks of William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Sartoris; Thomas Wolfe's great epic of narcissism, family piety and nostalgia, Look Homeward, Angel; and Ernest Hemingway's pseudo-tough romance A Farewell to Arms ("You won't do our things with another girl?" whispered the dying nurse...