What makes a novel timeless?
Leyao Wang, Farzaneh Heidari, Anh Truong Phuong Nguyen, Joris van Zundert, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Raymond A. Mar, Buddhika Bellana · 2025
Novels that are bestsellers upon publication are not necessarily popular decades later. Timelessbooks—popular well after publication—are a rare occurrence, standing the test of time anddistinguishing themselves from the millions of books published each year. Is it possible topredict which books will be timeless, versus merely best-selling, based on superficial textualfeatures alone? We built two corpora of books, published between 1909 and 1923: (1) those thatwere best-selling (i.e., popular upon publication), and (2) those that have become timeless (i.e.,popular a century later). A machine learning model was then trained to predict whether a novelwas timeless or merely best-selling, based on textual features alone. Our models were able toachieve approximately 70% classification accuracy, and identified several key psycholinguisticfeatures of timeless books that distinguished them from those that were merely popular uponpublication.