Several more jokey updated versions of Ladybird or Enid Blyton books (which between them had three top 20 entries in 2016) were released, perhaps for the final year, but the best-selling were just outside the top 100. YouTube idols venturing into print have disappeared too, as have Minecraft manuals. Adult colouring books, for instance, still sell – Keep Calm and Colour Unicorns was among the most popular – but no longer well enough to make this list, let alone the top 10 as in their heyday. It helps too that the challenges previously posed to this oligopoly by short-lived fads have receded, and were not replaced in 2017 by another vogue with the same commercial impact.

These near-perpetual kings of Christmas have been able to retain or regain their places in the chart’s elite without difficulty because in 2017 only Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (10) exemplified the kind of windfalls publishers and booksellers have become accustomed to, when big names – such as Bill Bryson, Harper Lee and Alex Ferguson as well as Rowling and James – enter the pre-festive fray and take on the producers of annual instalments or iterations of a series.

The best books to read 2017