John Galt Is Smiling

clipped from www.realclearmarkets.com The biggest under-appreciated political story of this year is the astonishing surge in the sales of Ayn Rand's epic 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. In the past week, the ranking page which shows the top sellers among all of the books offered through Amazon.com showed the novel surging into the top 20, climbing as high as #16. Remember that this is a thousand-page-long, 52-year-old novel that is heavy on philosophical content. And those rankings surely understate actual sales, since the novel is listed under at least three separate editions, each showing strong sales in its own right. Looking at Amazon bestseller lists in narrower categories, Atlas has been steadily in the top ten in Literature & Fiction (briefly hitting #1 during the past week) and has been switching between the #1 and #2 spot in Classics, routinely beating out lesser works like The Federalist Papers, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Heck, the Cliffs Notes to Atlas Shrugged rank in the top 20