Twilight of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog?

It was Bennett Cerf—founder of Random House, conscience of What’s My Line—who gazed over the bestseller lists of his day and invented the can’t-miss title for a book-publishing smash hit. Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, he reasoned, would compel three groups of customers to rush to the bookstore: animal-lovers, Civil War buffs, and hypochondriacs. Taken together, and allowing for overlap, these groups accounted for the entire literate population of mid-century America.

The country has undergone profound changes since Cerf’s day, of course, but the bestseller lists still show a nation of book-buyers in love with their pets and consumed by their ailments, real or imaginary. The big difference is in Lincoln books. While publishers continue to produce them with wild abandon, they sell rather less energetically than product with “M.D.” or “Marley” on the cover. That may be about to change.

Earlier this month, Grand Central Publishing released Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a book that ingeniously combines two proven genres, one of them very hot, the other overdue for reheating. Not since the darkest days in 15th-century Transylvania has a nation been so enamored of vampires as Americans are in 2010. If you won’t take The Scrapbook’s word for it (you won’t?), ask the parents of our great nation’s teenage girls, every one of whom is at this very moment either reading one of the books in the Twilight series (vampire meets girl, vampire loses girl, vampire tries to decide whether to phlebotomize girl) or watching one of the spectacularly successful movie knockoffs. In an era when book publishers struggle to survive, only vampires offer glimmers of hope. Vampires move units.