In today’s dead-tree New York Times (but apparently, based on the online date stamp, yesterday’s pixel edition), writer/editor Dana Jennings invokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick to illuminate his feelings about living with prostate cancer:

This is the way prostate cancer often feels, as if my world had turned into a Philip K. Dick dystopia in which the cold intent of many people—especially my insurer and the other bureaucrats who populate the health-care-industrial-complex—was to translate me into an abstraction, to deny my damaged and tiresome flesh-and-bloodness.

I have no idea whether or not Jennings—the author of this year’s bestselling Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music— is a science-fiction reader or fan, or just happened to pick up the Dick meme from the movies, but regardless, I think Dick would have been amused to have been conflated with a disease.

Particularly that one.

GalleyCat reports that the Library of America’s collection of Philip K. Dick novels—Four Novels of the 1960s, which was published last year and contained The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik—was that project’s fastest-selling title ever.

The story even provided sales details, which I don’t often see revealed in stories like this:

Marketing manager Brian McCarthy was happy to oblige, informing me that the Library had shipped 23,750 copies of Four Novels of the 1960s—the better part of two complete print runs—and that returns were a “staggeringly low” 5 percent. By way of comparison, the Library’s last major foray into science fiction and fantasy, the H.P. Lovecraft Tales published in 2005, sold 11,860 copies (with a similar return rate) in its first year (with gross sales-to-date now standing at 26,000-plus).

I wasn’t one of those purchasers, as I’d already read all of Dick during my teen years, when I’d gorged on all of SF’s past masters. But I’m pleased to see that the interest is there.

I wish we could somehow determine how many people who bought the book were already SF readers and/or Philip K. Dick fans, and how many picked it up as just the latest installment in their education in the American literary canon. Impossible, of course, so there’s no way we’ll ever know.

The Stranger reports what it considers to be “the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books” as part of an article written by someone who’s worked at an independent bookstore for eight years. I believe they only bring in the Times metaphorically, though, and that the list is only anecdotal.

The “authoritative top five” supposedly are:

1. Charles Bukowski
2. Jim Thompson
3. Philip K. Dick
4. William S. Burroughs
5. Any Graphic Novel

I’d always heard that the Bible topped any such list, but that might be apocryphal.