Oprah Taps Faulkner

by Charlotte Abbott -- Publishers Weekly, 6/6/2005

William Faulkner got the nod last Friday from Oprah, who departed from the usual one-author, one-title format for her summer reading pick by selecting three paperbacks by the Nobel Prize-winning giant of American letters. Vintage has already shipped 500,000 copies and ordered a further 100,000 of a $29.95 boxed set that includes As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August with a reading group guide.

Past selections for Oprah's three year-old classics club have had a sales windfall of at least 750,000 copies. It remains to be seen if the relatively high price of the Faulkner boxed set and its combined total of more than 1,000 pages will affect its sales.

The summer pick has become the main event for the club, typically selling more copies than titles selected at other times. Last summer's pick, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, sold more than 900,000 copies, compared to 740,000 copies of the fall 2004 selection, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, and 735,000 copies of the spring 2004 selection, Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. This year, Oprah did not make a spring selection, as she did in 2004.

Sales for the classic book club were strongest the year Oprah launched it. The first pick, selected in June 2003, was John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which sold more than 1.2 million copies, and was probably helped by the centennial celebration of Steinbeck's birth the previous year.