WATCH FOR THE DAGGER

Something funny has happened to The New York Times best seller list published in the Sunday Times Book Review section. For several weeks in a row, three of the top five in the current hardcover list had a dagger at the end of the listing. The dagger leads to a footnote that says that “some book stores report receiving bulk orders.” Could the list be a fixed game?

No. 1 on the current list is “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News” by Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS correspondent. A January column in The Times by Martin Arnold said that the book’s “climb to the top of the list is perhaps the most astonishing publishing event in the last 12 months.” Regnery, the country’s leading publisher of conservative books, published the book and uses an online advertisement that shows President Bush leaving the White House “with a copy of Regnery’s ‘Bias’ tucked under his arm.”

Another dagger appeared until this week on the No. 3 selection, Barbara Olson’s “The Final Days,” her account of “the last, desperate abuses of power” of the Clinton White House. It is also a Regnery book, the latest of 10 anti-Clinton titles that house has published since 1996.

Still another dagger denoted bulk sales of “The Death of the West” by Patrick J. Buchanan, the right-wing pundit, compiler of the Nixon administration’s “Enemies List,” and former presidential candidate. He contends that “immigrant invasions” threaten Western culture. Until this week his book was in fifth place.

An obvious question about all three is whether the bulk sales helped boost the ratings for these three books. Rigging the best seller list is a tough assignment, since The Times conceals the identities of the almost 4,000 bookstores plus wholesalers serving another 50,000 retailers that it surveys. An inquiry to The Times about the quantity of these current bulk sales and whether they have influenced the positions of these three books brought this response: “While we are unable to share the proprietary practices that we follow to create each week’s hard cover best seller list, we can say that several years ago our editors decided to share with our readers the fact that large quantities of books are sold through bulk sales (e.g., corporate purchases, special promotions, etc.) not just through sales to individual readers.

“Internally, when we review books for our list we factor it in the influence of bulk sales accordingly. Bulk sales are a fact in today’s world of publishing and we aim to fairly reflect their influence in our list.”

So, if you keep watching for the dagger, it’s nice to know that The Times is keeping watch, too. And doing something about it.