Santa Sure Had Eclectic Taste in Book Choices : How Else Can You Explain a Sweet Christmas Tale and Howard Stern Sharing Bestseller Honors?

It proved to be the little box that could.

While Howard Stern and Bill Gates were duking it out for the title of champion Christmas author, the top prize went to Richard Paul Evans and his sweet-natured sleeper that wrapped up holiday sales: “The Christmas Box” (Simon & Shuster).

The book by the former advertising writer may have prompted USA Today to sniff that “literary purists may shudder [at it] like Jacob Marley in his chains.” But it topped bestseller lists in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, and continued to sell briskly up to the wire, according to representatives for major chains and independent stores.

The slender volume benefited from word-of-mouth manna after the Utah writer self-published it, handing out copies at the 1994 booksellers’ convention in Los Angeles. Simon & Shuster bought the hardcover rights for $4.2 million in February and bolstered sales of the $12.95 gift edition with a media bombardment. The story centers on a Salt Lake City father who discards his workaholic shell to learn the true meaning of Christmas.

“It’s a simple story that a lot of people identified with,” says Stan Hynds, a buyer for Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, which sponsored a book signing with Evans and Richard Thomas, star of the CBS-TV version that aired a week before Christmas. “The book is kind of a phenomenon. [The signing] was wildly successful.”

After the “Box,” the self-styled King of All Media, Stern, slid slightly past software mogul Gates in a neck-and-neck race for serious sales of their respective books, “Miss America” (ReganBooks) and “The Road Ahead” (Penguin), according to Crown Books and Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookseller.

The top contenders left booksellers scratching their heads over the country’s eclectic taste.

“No. 2 was ‘Miss America,’ ” mused Crown spokesman Stan Rubenstein. “You put that together with ‘The Christmas Box’ and you tell me.”

The year’s other big celebrity title, Colin Powell’s “My American Journey” (Random House), slipped several notches on various chains’ lists, but booksellers wrote off his more modest holiday sales to the memoir’s debut on shelves in September, months before Stern and Gates took their November bows.

“I think his book may end up being the No. 1 nonfiction book of the year because it has sold so well,” says Robert Wietrak, vice president of merchandising for Barnes & Noble Inc., which includes B. Dalton and Bookstar. “People are looking for heroes, not Howard Stern.”

Still, Stern, whose frenzied first-day sales made publishing history, has fans even among the staff of the more rarefied Dutton’s Bookstore in Brentwood.

“It surprises me, too,” says owner Doug Dutton.

But for every copy it sold of “Miss America,” the independent sold five of David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln” (Simon & Shuster), which has taken Truman’s place in the hearts of presidential biography devourers.

Dutton’s other swift-selling tomes included “The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov” and a surprisingly popular, quirky book called “Longitude” by Dava Sobel.

“Think of it for a second--a book on longitude,” Dutton says. “It’s not even latitude, for goodness’ sake.”

A book that flew out of another independent store, Vroman’s, was the poignant children’s book “The Jester Has Lost His Jingle,” written and illustrated by Yale graduate David Saltzman before his death from Hodgkin’s disease days before his 23rd birthday. The book was published by his parents, USC journalism professor Joe Saltzman and Barbara Saltzman, an entertainment editor at The Times, after commercial publishers urged them to shorten it.

Vroman’s reordered the book six times and sold more than 100 copies. “I had no expectations whatsoever,” Hynds says. “I didn’t know it was going to absolutely go through the roof.”

Of course, fiction writers with built-in devoted followings racked up big sales for their latest offerings, particularly Danielle Steel for “Five Days in Paris” (Delacorte) and Michael Crichton for “The Lost World” (Knopf).

Overall, while other retailers shivered amid this season’s frigid sales, booksellers reported toasty business, often better than last year’s. One speculated that the other retailers’ loss may have been bookstores’ gain.

“When people tell me they aren’t selling a lot of high-priced items and books are selling well,” Rubenstein says, “maybe [it’s because] books are smaller unit costs and make a better gift for people concerned about budgets.”