The publishing industry has always had a finger on the pulse of American intellectual and political life. But what's the effect when the country's heartbeat accelerates and its adrenaline level soars, as it did following the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11? After a sharp drop-off in sales the week of the attacks, many bookstores stabilized at a level close to the previous year's within the next week. As political discussions raged in print, on television and over dinner tables, booksellers increased orders for titles that help readers make sense of the new political landscape. While few have said they are surprised at the popularity of titles on terrorism, biological warfare, Middle Eastern politics and government intelligence, a number were caught off guard by some of the books that haven't moved, such as books about civil liberties. Meanwhile, publishers have been scrambling to reprint newly relevant books and to rush the publications of others, while bracing for returns on titles that only seven weeks ago looked like sure things. And everyone is closely watching the market, trying to understand what it means for books due to arrive in the early months of 2002.
Frontrunners
In intellectual and academic strongholds, such as Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., or Cody's in Berkeley, Calif., the strongest sellers in the eight weeks since the attacks have been about Islam and the Middle East, such as Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History (Modern Library, 2000), as well as her Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (Harper San Francisco, paper, 1993), and Benjamin R. Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (Ballantine, paper, 1996). At Cody's, Patrick Marks also saw a brisk trade in maps of the Middle East, as well as Edward Said's Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) and Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (Vintage, revised 1997).
Barbara Meade, co-owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., sold more than 250 copies in October of Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale, paper, 2000), and 100 copies in October of Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad (S&S, Sept.). Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God (Ballantine, paper, Jan.), which had already sold well there, remained popular. Because of an International Monetary Fund conference that had been scheduled in Washington, D.C. at the end of September (and later canceled), the store had also stocked and displayed a wide range of titles about globalization including Thomas Friedman's The Lexis and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (Anchor, 2000) and Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dream of the Post Cold War (Vintage, Feb.). Meade noted that these and other titles were doing well, which she attributed to a desire for customers to gain a wider understanding of the complexities of geopolitics.
In the heartland, Sharon Kelly Roth of Books and Co. in Dayton, Ohio, noted that regular customers appreciated the flag displays in the window and around the store. While many other stores were empty on September 11, people came into Books and Co. and gathered in small groups to discuss the unfolding crisis. Since then, titles such as Germs and Taliban have sold well. A major difference between Books and Co. and stores on the coasts was that Roth has found that fictional titles with contemporary political resonances, such as Vince Flynn's Separation of Powers (Pocket, Oct.), about a terrorist attack on the United States, had also boomed. "People seem to want a story that dealt with the issues, but that had a clear and happy ending," Roth said.
In Memphis, Tenn., Corey Mesler, owner and manager of Burke's Bookstore, said that--aside from such obviously hot titles as Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Prima, paper, Sept.) and Robert Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center (Basic, paper, 2000)--he was surprised that books about germ warfare were moving quickly even before the first reports of the anthrax attacks. "People seemed to think that this was the next logical subject to read about."
Meanwhile, buoyed by extensive coverage of journalist Barbara Olson's death on the hijacked plane that hit the Pentagon, her latest book, The Final Days: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Last, Desperate Abuses of Power in the Clinton White House, made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list at number two on November 4. Regnery Publishing currently has 150,000 hardcovers in print. Olson's Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (1999) has remained in the upper reaches of the Amazon.com bestseller list since September 11.
Books about U.S. intelligence operations and foreign policy have also fared well. Certainly David Halberstam's critically acclaimed War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals (Scribner, Sept.) has garnered attention and readers; its analysis of the impact of U.S. foreign and domestic policies on the current situation may be indispensable reading for the foreseeable future. Other new and recently released books--such as Christopher Whitcomb's Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescuer Team (Little, Brown, Sept.), Anthony Lake's 6 Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them (Back Bay, Sept.), and Chalmers Johnson's Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Owl, Jan. 2001), as well as more academic titles like Philip B. Heymann's Terrorism and America: Commonsense Strategy for a Democratic Society (MIT Press, 2000) and Ken Deffeyes's Hubberts Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, Oct.)--are selling steadily so far, according to their publishers.
As the crisis has generated demand for new information that was not always readily abundant, South End Press, a small, progressive press based in Cambridge, Mass., found a whole new readership. Sales on some books have "gone through the roof," according to publisher and collective member Loie Hayes. Since September 11, the press has shipped more than 1,600 copies of Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian's Propaganda and the Public Mind (paper, May), while its new edition of Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle (paper, 1999), dealing with Mideastern conflicts, has shipped more than 1,000 copies. They have also brought back into print Edward Harman's The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (paper, revised in 1998), hoping for strong sales on that title as well.
South End, which has never maintained a high profile, has recently received calls from C-Span, Nightline and David Letterman for Anthony Arnove's anthology Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (paper, 2000). Also promising is Power Politics (paper, Sept.), a collection of political essays by Arundhati Roy (who won the Booker Prize for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things) addressing human rights and geopolitics in India and Pakistan. Published in September, the book has already gone back to press several times as Roy made news when, in a general crackdown on progressive political activists, she was held in contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court on charges of inciting assassinations of members of the Court.
Inching off the Shelves
But how are booksellers drawing attention to the fall books they ordered last summer or earlier, which may be only indirectly relevant to our current moment? In an effort to connect with some reader's new, diligent interest in history, some booksellers are displaying and handselling the many presidential histories signaling a renaissance in that genre. David McCullough's John Adams (S&S, Apr.) has already topped the bestseller lists for more than five months. Among the recent biographies with obvious parallels to current events are Joseph E. Persico's just released Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (Random) and Greg Morris's By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard Univ.). Other recent and imminent publications include Richard Reeves's Nixon: Alone in the White House (S&S, Oct.); Michael Beschloss's Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes 1964—1965 (S&S, Nov.), Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex (Random, Nov.) and Louis Auchincloss's appreciation of Theodore Roosevelt (Holt/Times Books, Jan. 2002). To highlight the books, Harvard Book Store is planning a display entitled "Presidents in Crisis." However, Barbara Meade at Politics and Prose said she doesn't know if the books will connect to readers who are looking for answers to the current plight, though she thinks they will be bought by serious readers of history. She also notes the historical pattern that most presidents were caught unaware and unprepared by their own historical crisis and learned, as we are seeing now, to deal with it as it was happening.
Readers' rush to grapple with and understand all aspects of the new political crisis has dramatically slowed interest in the already overpublished shelf of books about last year's political crisis, the 2000 presidential election. Almost all booksellers interviewed reported that such titles as David A. Kaplan's The Accidental President (Morrow, Oct.), Jeffrey Toobin's much-anticipated Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (Random, Oct.), Richard Posner's Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts (Princeton, July), and Alan Dershowitz's Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (Oxford, June) were beginning to find an audience early in September, but seemed to hold little interest for book buyers after September 11. Even the September 17 Newsweek cover story and excerpt of the Kaplan book did not particularly help sales.
This does not bode well for titles on the election that are just hitting stores now. Booksellers are mustering only limited hopes for such titles as John Nichols and David Deschamp's Jews for Buchanan (New Press, Nov.), Douglas Kellner's Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Stolen Election (Rowman & Littlefield, Nov.), Abner Green's Understanding the 2000 Election (NYU Press, Oct.) and Jack N. Rackove's anthology The Unfinished Election of 2000 (Basic, Oct.). None of these books were helped by the media consortium that includes the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the broadcaster CNN deciding on October 22--for the sake of national unity in the current political crisis--not to release an in-depth analysis of the Florida election they had commissioned from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which, according to inside sources, gave the state election to Al Gore.
Given the world situation, it is not surprising that the small number of humor books critical of President Bush--such as Jacob Weisberg's George W. Bushisms: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President (S&S, January) and Mark Crispin Miller's Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (Norton, May)--have also been hard hit.
Another casualty of September 11 were books critiquing both the Clinton administration and the Clintons themselves. Notwithstanding the success of Barbara Olson's titles--driven by her high visibility in the media in the days following her death--Politics and Prose's Barbara Meade claimed that she "can't remember when we sold an anti-Clinton book last," and most other booksellers agreed.
Among the domestic political issues that evaporated from public interest after September 11 was genetically engineered foods. Books such as Duff Wilson's Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (HarperCollins, Sept.) and Daniel Charles's Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, Sept.) seem to be dying on the vine, with both Wilson's and Charles's tours canceled. Bioterrorism rather than biotechnology is the watchword of the moment.
Looking Ahead
Like the U.S. government and public, many major publishers have been caught flat-footed by the terrorist attacks, with few relevant books in the pipeline for the winter/spring 2002 season. University and think tank presses are somewhat better prepared, but in any case, the lasting effects of September 11, the U.S. government's response and the course of both U.S. and global politics in the coming months will be extremely difficult to anticipate.
Among the academic titles that are likely to garner the spotlight in the coming months is a new book by Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who reaped a windfall for Yale University Press with his bestselling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Originally scheduled for late spring, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia was mostly written at the time of the attacks. Rashid has since updated the first three chapters, while Yale has rushed publication to February 25, anticipating a first printing as high as 50,000, said senior publicist Brenda King. University of California Press is also pushing up publication of Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad by David B. Edwards, an anthropology professor at Williams College, about how a democratic Afghan state failed. The press is aiming for publication in April and doubling its original print run.
Few booksellers evinced overwhelming enthusiasm for any of the political books immediately on the horizon. For the moment, they will stick with what's working. Carole Horneof Harvard Book Store is planning to order "15 or 20 copies of the reissue of Karen Armstrong's Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World [Anchor, Nov.] rather than the three or four" she might have ordered before. In the current atmosphere of uncertainty, it will take much longer than a few months to come up with a book that will encapsulate our moment and the political dilemmas we face.
