Complimenting their 11 Things You Might Not Know About Jim Davis of two years ago, Mental Floss has now issued 20 Things You Might Not Know About Garfield.
A major Garfield accomplishment was changing the New York Times Best Selling List.
17. THE GARFIELD COMIC STRIP BOOKS HAVE BEEN HUGE HITS “The 11 Garfield comic strip books have all been number one on the New York Times Bestseller List,” Davis says. “At one time there were seven on the list simultaneously. At that point, they changed the way the list was done because other publishing houses were complaining that their authors couldn’t get on the list because of Garfield. Garfield at Large (1980) was number one for two solid years. Over 100 weeks.” The title of every compilation book is a reference to either food or Garfield’s weight.
Here is Tony’s Trading Gallery of Garfield’s U. S. books.
Something not on Mental Floss’ list:
The Garfield books basically killed off the U. S. comic strip mass market paperback editions. The impressive success of the landscape Garfield books had book publishers forsaking the longtime mass market paperback small portrait format in favor of the new landscape format. By the end of the 1980s the mmpb editions for U.S. comic strip reprints was almost gone. And the beginning of that end was the 1980 publication of the landscape Garfield At Large, the first Garfield collection. (Though the mmpb format did continue in the U.K.)
