One for the (History) Books
-- 8/3/98
Stephen Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan has been getting the kind of front-cover, prime-time coverage that rarely happens in filmland. And while the hoopla landed the movie in the #1 spot its first week out (box office receipts: $30.1 million), the film's wrenching story is also making for impressive sales for several books. The 28,000-copy first printing of Newmarket Press's Illustrated Movie Companion, Saving Private Ryan: The Men, The Mission, The Movie (which includes 130 color photos by the film's still photographer David James) sold out two days after the movie opened; a second printing (25,000 copies) will hit stores this week, with a third (35,000) set to arrive later this month.Bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose, who served as a consultant on the film, is also getting a lot of media play; his publisher, Simon &Schuster, has been watching backlist sales climb. D-Day, first published in 1995, is especially strong, along with Band of Brothers and hardcover copies of Citizen Soldiers. S&S's Touchstone imprint is shipping 200,000 copies of the Citizen Soldiers trade paper edition in early September, and in October S&S will release Ambrose's latest, The Victors: Eisenhower &His Boys: The Men of WWII. (Both of the latter titles were originally scheduled for November.) Signet's mass market novelization of Saving Private Ryan is also moving up the lists, with 500,000 copies in print after six printings. Back To Bestsellers---> |
