The golden gusher

Abstract

NOT MANY authors are spared long enough to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their first ‘bestseller’ but last month J B Priestley could sit back and reflect upon the huge success of his picaresque novel, The good companions, first published 22nd July 1929. At first it achieved a modest but steady sale, seven thousand five hundred copies were sold by the end of the month, but from then onwards it took off in no uncertain fashion; at the height of the Christmas season his publishers, who had tentatively printed ten thousand copies originally, were sending out some five thousand a day. A year after publication it was still selling over one thousand copies a week at half a guinea a time. No wonder Priestley himself described it thirty years later as ‘this giant jackpot, this golden gusher, this genie out of the bottle’.

Citation

Day, A. (1979), "The golden gusher", New Library World, Vol. 80 No. 8, pp. 156-157. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb038446