Late last week, a reader asked us an interesting question: Since most of the coverage of the launch of Tina Brown's new website, The Daily Beast, mentioned that she appropriated the name from the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, what's been going on with sales of the novel lately?

A representative for Nielsen Bookscan said that its participating booksellers have reported approximately 3,000 copies of Scoop since the company started keeping track of such things back in 2001. What with the sales being stretched out over a seven-year period, there's never been one week in which the book sold 1,000 units; however, the representative informed us that sales for the week ending October 12 showed an 83 percent increase over the sales for the week immediately preceding.

(We read Scoop in the midst of a massive Waugh binge back in 2000 and heartily recommend it.)