The January Red Box, mailing to stores this week, will include a packet of 50 bookmarks featuring The New York Times Book Review’s picks for the 10 Best Books of 2017 [4].

The “10 best” were narrowed down by the Times Book Review’s editors from an earlier list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

“The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017 is not necessarily a list of the books that best capture the current moment or the books that contain messages we editors think are most important — though some of them certainly do, particularly this year,” said Pamela Paul, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and a speaker at the upcoming Winter Institute [5]. “What we’re really looking for are books we think embody excellence on many fronts: the originality and scope of the author’s ambition and the author’s execution of that vision. The quality of the language and the writing on a sentence level. The sheer storytelling power. These are books that we think you’ll actually want to read rather than perch artfully on a shelf (though there’s that, too).

“We are creating these bookmarks because this list does not just end in 2017. We think these books will matter to readers for years to come, books we think people will remember long after they’ve read them, and books we think deserve to be remembered. We are reaching out to America’s best independent bookstores to help readers bear these books in mind as they try to answer that perennial question, ‘What should I read next?’

“Here are our 10 Best Books of 2017. May they last for many years in the minds of your readers, and ours.”

ABA member booksellers can download PDF and PNG images of the bookmark, as well as an animated GIF, in BookWeb’s DIY [6].