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Penguin Group (USA) Scores Four #1 New York Times Bestsellers Simultaneously for the Week of December 23rd

Penguin Group (USA) achieves an outstanding four #1 slots simultaneously on The New York Times bestseller lists for the week of December 23rd. T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton (G. P. Putnam's Sons) debuts at #1 on the hardcover fiction list; The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (NAL) holds at #1 on the trade fiction paperback list in its fourth week; Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts (Jove) stays at #1 on the mass market fiction list in its third week; and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) returns to the #1 slot, in its 46th week on the paperback nonfiction list. Congratulations to everyone involved with the terrific success of these books.

This represents the second time in 2007 that the house has had four titles simultaneously at #1 on The New York Times bestseller lists. Back in June, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead Books), Al Gore's The Assault on Reason (The Penguin Press), Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) and The Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham and the Useless Information Society (Perigee) were all at #1. A Thousand Splendid Suns topped the hardcover fiction list; The Assault on Reason was atop the nonfiction list; Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love was #1 on the paperback nonfiction list; and The Book of Useless Information topped the Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous paperback list, representing the Perigee imprint's first #1 New York Times bestseller — all for the week of June 17th.

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I woke up one morning with an outline of The Works: Anatomy of a City in my head. It wasn’t long after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had come down -- late in 2001 or early in 2002. If you remember, there was article after article in the papers about what happened to our city’s infrastructure that day -- why the Con Ed substation failed, what happened to Verizon and its telecom connections, how the #1 subway path was obstructed, the impact on the slurry wall under the Trade Center, etc. Many of these articles had fabulous, accompanying graphics -- to show lay readers what things really looked like underground and how they worked.

Now I knew much of this stuff from a previous career at the Port Authority, but seeing these articles made me realize how little people who don’t work for public agencies, or who aren’t involved at all with what lies beneath city streets, know about how things work in a big, complicated city like New York. So I woke up that morning with the idea of doing a David Macaulay (author of the terrific book The Way Things Work)-like book about the way New York City’s infrastructure works, and before I even reached for coffee I had jotted down the half dozen chapters that would feature in it.