When Lyons Press was acquired by Globe Pequot in 2001, one of its backlist gems was Slavomir Rawicz's memoir, The Long Walk. Originally published in the U.K., the book, about the author's harrowing escape from a Soviet labor camp in 1941, has long been a steady seller for Lyons. And now, as a film adaptation of the book called The Way Back is set to hit theaters, GP is doing a push to re-energize the title's sales.
According Janice Goldklang, GP's executive director of editorial, Lyons Press published The Long Walk in 1988 after one of its editors discovered the book in a secondhand bookstore in England. The title was out of print in Europe and had never been published in the States. The book, which drew a notable amount of press when it was first released, has continued to sell, Goldklang thinks, in large part to strong word-of-mouth; she estimated that the imprint has roughly half a million copies of the book in print now.
The dramatic rights to The Long Walk had been tied up for years, but when it became clear that Australian director Peter Weir (The Truman Show, Master and Commander) would be pushing forward with a film adaptation, GP planned to re-launch the book and now has three editions in print. The imprint's longstanding trade paperback, featuring a red-twinged landscape blocked by barbed wire, has been stickered with a burst citing the adaptation, and GP has also issued two new editions: a movie tie-in trade paperback and a limited edition hardcover.
The movie tie-in edition, which GP did a first announced printing of 100,000 copies for, came out in mid November and the press is working with Newmarket Films (which is releasing The Way Back) to cross-promote the book with the film. (The Way Back, which stars Ed Harris and Colin Farrell, is getting a limited release this month, to be considered for the Oscars, and will open wide at the end of January.) The hardcover edition, which is the first hardcover the publisher has done for the book, went to press for 5,000 copies, and Goldklang said it's intended for "collectors."
In the book Rawicz, who died in 2004, chronicles his and his fellow inmates' 4,000-mile trek from Siberia to Calcutta through what Goldklang called the "worst possible geographic terrain." The book, which a GP rep said has long been a "cornerstone" of Lyons Press's adventure line, will now, it's hoped, reach even more readers.
