Remembering the bump in sales that followed Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide, I’ve been tracking the sales ranks of Saul Bellow’s most popular books on Amazon.com since 7:30 PM yesterday. Here, so far, are the results:

(Originally, I also wanted to chart Bellow’s Collected Stories in hardcover, thinking his passing might encourage readers to invest in that more “official” and durable format. But, while the sales rank of Collected Stories‘s hardcover edition showed a slight improvement between 7:30 PM and 6:00 AM, the improvement wasn’t dramatic enough to counteract the dramatic verticality its inclusion would force upon the chart. Starting at a rank of 466,613, it would have reduced the all-important 0 – 20,000 range to a meaningless line.)