Mr. Kinsley and a colleague put coupons redeemable for five dollars each in the back of 70 copies of selected books in Washington bookstores. Two of the books were ''Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control'' by Strobe Talbott and ''The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong'' by Ben J. Wattenberg. Though neither was a national best seller, they were chosen, Mr. Kinsley said, as the kinds of books Washingtonians were most likely to claim to have read. No one ever redeemed a coupon. The Kinsley report may be as scientific a study as there is.

The unread best seller seems to be a subject that makes many people, and not just book buyers, uncomfortable. One New York retailer at first said, ''We do regularly laugh about this,'' and quickly named the latest Tom Wolfe novel, ''A Man in Full'' (''Everybody thought they had to have it'') and Harold Bloom's ''Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'' (''Everybody would like to think they're going to read that much about Shakespeare, but then they don't'') as two books she thought were more bought than read. But ultimately she decided not to be quoted by name. Still, she did recount the story of a friend's husband who had ''actually read the Hawking and then went around for a month trying to get a conversation going about it -- but no one else had read it.''

Others are more forthright. Michael Willis was the marketing director at the Free Press in 1994, when the company published ''The Bell Curve'' by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.''We thought it was very much the case that both professionals and the general public bought it to have it and didn't read it,'' he says. ''We got the sense even from reviews that people basically read the first chapter and the last.''

Jack Cella is the manager of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, a cooperative bookstore near the University of Chicago that has numbered both Allan Bloom and Bellow among its members. He suggests that Seamus Heaney's ''Beowulf'' is a current example of the unread best seller. ''I'm pleased but astounded by the number of copies we've sold,'' he says. Has he read it? ''No, I haven't read it. But I did buy it. I'm a prime example.'' Now that an audio version of the poem, with Heaney reading his translation, has been released, Mr. Cella says he plans to ''listen to it in the car'' on his summer vacation.

He adds, by the way, that ''The Closing of the American Mind'' was not only read by its Co-op buyers, many of whom knew Bloom, but was also probably the fastest-selling book in the store's history until, of course, ''Ravelstein.''