Oprah's Book Club: the original selections 1996 to 2011

Between September 1996 and December 2010 The Oprah Winfrey Show chose seventy books, and the choice moved copies on a scale publishing had never seen: the "Oprah editions", printed with the club's seal on the jacket, sold more than fifty-five million copies in all. The list ran from new fiction by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Wally Lamb and Jane Hamilton, through Toni Morrison four times, to a season of classics in 2003 to 2005 (Steinbeck, Paton, García Márquez, McCullers, Tolstoy, Buck and a summer of three Faulkners) and a final pair of Dickens novels. The rows above are the selections we catalogue, in order of announcement.

For collectors the club is a trap and a lesson. The announcement sent each book back to press in a new printing with the club's sticker or seal, and those are the copies that fill second-hand shops; the ABAA's glossary says plainly that a first edition of an Oprah selection is not worth more for having been chosen. The collectable copy is the first printing in the original jacket, issued before the seal, and for the new fiction on the list that copy can be surprisingly hard to find because the first printings were small and the club printings enormous. The classics are a different matter: the East of Eden a reader bought in 2003 is a paperback, while the Viking first of 1952 in its jacket is a four-figure book, and Night, Anna Karenina and the Faulkners have firsts that run to five figures.

Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources, its points are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing. The Oprah edition on your shelf is worth a few dollars; the page shows what the first printing looks like instead.