On another sports front, Da Capo's trade paperback edition of H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream is marking its fourth week on PW's lists. Called by Sports Illustrated one of the five greatest sports books ever, this 1990 title has been thrust back into the limelight thanks to a movie adaptation that's received overwhelmingly positive reviews (in all of which the book, too, has been widely praised) and raked in major box-office coin—it opened in second place on October 8 with an impressive $21.6 million gross. Coinciding with the movie's momentum, director Peter Berg, at the request of Universal Studios, accompanied Bissinger on an eight-city tour and on the Universal L.A. press junket. In addition, ESPN selected Friday Night Lights to launch its book club. Features about the book and its transfer to celluloid have appeared in the New York Times (last spring and on October 12) and the Los Angeles Times. Not surprisingly, Da Capo's promo plans and media hits read like an extensive NFL playbook, and the publisher estimates the in-print total of the book's four editions at one million copies—"We've reprinted the movie tie-in trade edition seven times, the original trade paper edition six times, the mass market movie tie-in four times and the hardcover gift edition twice." Touchdown!
— with reporting by Dick Donahue
