Will Herodotus Take Off?
by Judy Quinn -- Publishers Weekly, 3/3/1997
Knopf is shooting for an interesting afterlife on the success of The English Patient: on April 3 it will release a 10,000-copy first printing of an Everyman's Library hardcover edition of Herodotus's The Histories, a favorite tome of Count Almasy, the character played by Ralph Fiennes in the film, who in the novel notes that "This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus." The original Everyman's edition was published in 1910, with a new introduction added in 1964, but both were U.K. editions. This edition, dropped in because of the movie, is a translation by George Rawlinson, will feature a new introduction by noted scholar Rosalind Thomas and will have a full-cover jacket reminiscent of the "Cave of Swimmers" scene from the film. But whether this tie-in will work as well as, for example, the promotion of the p try of Pablo Neruda to tie in with the film Il Postino remains to be seen: Penguin, which released a paperback of The Histories in September, reports to PW that it has not seen a significant bump in sales because of the movie, though University of Chicago Press sales director John Kessler said he has seen a bit of a blip for his house's solid backlist title. Stay tuned.
