Non-Fiction: Pinch of Nom Comfort Food makes itself comfortable
Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom: Comfort Food (Bluebird) bounced back into the UK Official Top 50 number one, after a week’s forced hiatus by Michael Mosley’s Fast 800 Keto (Short). The cookbook, in its seventh week at the top, sold 14,432 copies.
The early months of the year tend to see the lowest weekly volume for number one titles, with the big “event” hardbacks saved for the months running up to Christmas. In fact, 2017 kicked off with a six-week run of sub-20,000-copy number one bestsellers. However, paperback fiction titles are much more likely to post number one volumes below 15,000 copies—Pinch of Nom Comfort Food becomes the first number one non-fiction title to do so since The Highway Code in April 1999.
Of course, Comfort Food’s sales have to be taken into context—in fewer than two months on the shelves, it is just 98 copies short of 400,000 units. The lower-than-usual sales at the top of the chart also didn’t affect the market as a whole, which bounced 2.1% in volume and 2.4% in value week on week. Perhaps this demonstrates the current strength of depth in print, following 2021’s 5% bump in volume year on year, according to Nielsen, and value surpassed £1.8bn for the first time.
Sophie McCartney’s Tired and Tested (HarperNorth)was the highest new entry in Hardback Non-Fiction, scoring second place with 7,993 copies sold.
In Paperback Non-Fiction, Mosley’s Fast 800 Keto scored a sixth week in the top spot, selling 7,156 copies—surpassing 75,000 copies sold in total in a month and a half since publication. Julian Sancton’s The Madhouse at the End of the Earth (W H Allen) and Art Spiegelman’s The Complete MAUS (Penguin) made their debuts in the top five.
