Another quote from Matthew Engel's forthcoming Red Notebooks, this time by Adlai Stevenson: An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.

As the sales figures for 2006 flow in from all parts of Macmillan I thought I'd share with you over the next few days a more international representation of the non-chaff bestseller lists from our various companies.

First, South Africa where Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is second only to the perennial Guinness World Records.

3. Wilbur Smith's Triumph of the Sun

4. David Baldacci's The Collectors

5. Jeffrey Archer's Cat o' Nine Tails

6. The Google Story

7. Jeffrey Archer again with False Impressions

8. The 80th birthday edition of the condensed version of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom

9. Our Iceberg is Melting

10. Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes

Here in the UK it has been an interesting week for national statistics (a contradiction in terms?), with the simultaneous launch by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) of their new Personal Inflation Calculator to much media attention, and the launch, to a perhaps somewhat less frenzied press interest, of a new ONS journal publication – the monthly Economic and Labour Market Review - which Palgrave Macmillan publishes on behalf of the Office for National Statistics.

The two were launched together on Monday evening at an event hosted at the DTI conference centre in Victoria Street, London. The personal inflation calculator, which has been heavily trailed in the media already, is explained in detail in the new Economic & Labour Market Review. A definitive article on the new calculator can be accessed for free here.