Company founders Bob and Harry Slyman in an early TV ad.

Updated with comment from Tony Slyman of Appliance Discounters.

Slyman. The name has been synonymous with household appliances in St. Louis ever since brothers Bob and Harry Slyman aired a commercial of themselves seated on top of the Gateway Arch.

"Thanks for making us tops in town," the jovial brothers crowed in the 1972 advertisement that took liberal use of the then cutting-edge, green-screen technology.

Four decades later the Slyman Brothers appliance stores continue to operate with three St. Louis locations, though the family-owned business recently got some unexpected competition from within its own clan.

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Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending February 17, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Subterranean Books and The Book House.

This week The Book House in Webster Groves begins reporting sales to the St. Louis bestseller list. Also this week, local authors appear in force on the St. Louis bestseller list. Coincidence? Well, probably not.

At the top of the adult list is The Fallen, the second part of a trilogy of supernatural thrillers that began with The Light Bringer, the longtime bestseller by local authors and former cops Chris DiGiuseppi and Mike Force. (The Light Bringer itself comes in at number three.)

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Is there anything more that needs to be said?

Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending February 10, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

If you heard a strange exploding sound recently, it may have been the combustion of the minds of our city's science fiction geeks upon the discovery of this week's number-eight bestseller: Doctor Who: Shada: The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams by Gareth Roberts.

Let's parse this for a second. Apparently once upon a time, Douglas Adams, author of the canonical Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wrote a script for the equally-canonical TV series Doctor Who. The script was intended to star Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, but it was never produced. Instead if languished in obscurity...until now! It wasn't enough to publish the script, though. Instead the publisher decided to publish a novelization of said script, another classic form of science fiction writing, by Gareth Roberts, a master of the form.

Has there ever been a greater confluence of geekiness?

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It's like eating at Annie Gunn's, only you're safe at home.

Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending February 3, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

If disappointment in the dream of romance has turned your heart into a black, wizened lump of charcoal, look no further for your Valentine's Day reading than this week's number-one bestseller, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, a portrait of the marriage from hell. Well, since it is the number-one bestseller, what might we surmise about the state of love and romance in our fair city?

New to the list this week are a couple of local titles: St. Charles: A Postcard History by Valerie Battle Kienzle with the St. Charles County Historical Society and Rook Cooks: Simplicity at Its Finest by Lou Rook, a cookbook by the chef at Annie Gunn's.

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The number-seven kids' bestseller this week. But it has the number-one title.

Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 27, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

For the first time ever, one of the top books on the local bestseller list has a connection not to a movie or a reading, but to a play. The number one kids' book this week is Jackie and Me by Dan Gutman, the source material for the latest production by Metro Theater Company/Edison Theatre. The "Jackie" of the title is Jackie Robinson, and our young time-traveling hero learns a few lessons about prejudice and baseball history. (The play is good, too, reports Riverfront Times drama critic Dennis Brown.)

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Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 20, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

Even though hockey's back, this is the time of year when we yearn most for baseball, to be able sit outside in the heat and humidity (that's why there's beer) and cheer on our team. The Cardinals know this. That's why they have the Winter Warm Up every January. This year, it happened to coincide with the passing of Stan Musial, who, in addition to being a Hall of Fame player and a really nice guy, was also the embodiment of Cardinals history.

If it's too cold to watch or play baseball, you might as well read about it. Accordingly, this week's bestseller list is full of books about the Cards: George Vecsey's biography of Musial, Tony La Russa's memoir One Last Strike and a board book called St. Louis Cardinals 101 which, presumably, you can read to your two-year-old every night so she'll be fully prepared for Opening Day. (Hey, according to the cover copy, it's required reading.)

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Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 13, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

Just as January is the time for eating brown rice and kale and going back to the gym to improve your body, it's also the time for tackling big, important books that will improve your mind. And no book is better or more important than Tenth of December, the new collection of stories by George Saunders. It's been certified by all the places you trust to certify such things: the New York Times, the New Yorker, PBS, NPR. Besides, it's not like it's War and Peace or anything that takes forever to read. It's only short stories.

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Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 6, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books and Subterranean Books.

There are some changes to the local bestseller list this week. For one thing, for the first time in many months, neither Tony La Russa's One Last Strike nor William Knodelseder's Bitter Brew appears on the adult list. Has the market been saturated? Has our curiosity about the Cards' former skipper and the sins of the Busch family been satisfied at last? (At least until the next memoir or tell-all comes out.)

But the Cardinals are still represented in the form of Edward Everett Yates, the 27-year-old rookie who is the protagonist of The Might Have Been, the first novel by Webster prof Joe Schuster. Read it. Read it now. And then buy a couple of copies for your friends. Riverfront Times declared it the Best Book By a Local Author last year. What further endorsement do you need?

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Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending December 30, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books and Subterranean Books.

This week's bestseller list displays the effects of final-desperation holiday shopping, particularly on the kids' list: People grabbing books off the shelves that they actually enjoy and would like to bequeath unto a loved one. At least that's our favorite explanation for the presence of The Graveyard Books, The Secret Garden and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with a spiffy new cover!). And possibly Fifty Shades of Grey too? (Did any of you enjoy reading it? If you did, please let us know in the comments. Don't worry, they're anonymous.)

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Many people come up with the dumbest ideas of their lives during college. But, as Sean Branagan, director of the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Syracuse University, observes, some pretty good ideas have come from college students, too: Facebook, FedEx, Dell computers, Google, Reddit, to name a few.

What other great ideas are lurking on America's college campuses, Branagan wondered, unrecognized because college students traditionally lack the sort of financial backing to turn a class project into a full-fledged corporation?

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