Since its 2013 release, Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York (St. Martin’s) has figured prominently in two years’ worth of holiday gift guides and, according to Nielsen BookScan, sold more than 412,000 copies in hardcover. This season, several new releases are vying to fill that same voyeuristic space.
Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s). HONY’s direct sequel pubbed October 13 and has already sold more than 73,000 print units per BookScan. Stories continues the formula—photos plus candid interview excerpts—that Stanton has used since the 2010 launch of his blog.
The Sartorialist: X by Scott Schuman (Penguin). Like Stanton, Schuman (681,000 Instagram followers) shoots street portraits. But as his moniker suggests, the Sartorialist focuses more on personal style than personal stories. Though he hasn’t enjoyed the same blockbuster success in print that HONY has, Schuman started his fashion blog in 2005 and made the jump to print, with 2009’s The Sartorialist, a year before Stanton started his online project.
Every Person in New York by Jason Polan (Chronicle). In 2008, Polan set out to draw every person in New York City, and by December 2009, he had sketched 8,300 of them (or 0.1% of the population). The book features thousands of his line portraits and a forward by Kristen Wiig.
The Dogist by Elias Weiss Friedman (Artisan). If HONY and the Sartorialist had a canine love child, it would be the Dogist, a pooch-on-the-street Instagram account with 1.3 million followers.
Felines of New York by Jim Tews (Simon & Schuster). This HONY parody began life as a Tumblr (one that’s garnered almost 100,000 Facebook likes) pairing photos of cats with their alleged quotations. These “interviews” confirm what we all fear, as the jacket copy puts it: “Behind every New Yorker, there lays a cat just waiting to destroy their Ikea futon and then eat their faces off when they die.”
