Friends, please gather around the campfire for another round of our series exploring best-selling summer books of decades past! If you need something else to do today, you can catch up on the previous iterations, which dig into summer fiction, here. This year, having exhausted the novels, we’ve turned to the non-fiction list, which has proved pleasantly wacky so far. The 1980s were all over the place, the 1970s were primarily concerned with sex, diets, and politics, which stands to reason, and today, we’re packing up our poodle skirts and heading to the 1950s — or, as I put it in my notes this week: Summer Nonfiction Best-Sellers of the ‘50s: How weird will this be? (Spoiler: Pretty weird.)
Before we dive in, a refresher on my methodology: For our purposes, “summer” is the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day, a.k.a. American Summer Observed. Additionally, our friends at The New York …