'They Made America' Gets Facelift

by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2006

Little, Brown is going back to the drawing board, or rather folding it, for their reissue of Harold Evans' 2004 book, They Made America. The original edition, a coffee table-type book which profiled 70 notable Americans and was released in conjunction with a four-part PBS series, was lavishly illustrated with some 500 pictures. This time around Back Bay is releasing the title in paperback with virtually no images. The reason? The imprint thinks that this new edition will allow readers to focus on what might have been slightly upstaged the first time around: the words.

"So many of the reviews of the hardcover edition focused on the pleasures of the text — they praised They Made America as an eminently readable work of narrative history," publicist Sophie Cottrell said. "We wanted to draw attention to the text and its merits, so we eliminated the photographs, or at least the vast majority of them."

The title, which is just out, is something LB hopes will appeal to history buffs and those who buy business books; the imprint is also making a significant play for the academic market, pushing the title at business schools to see if it might get adopted for classroom use. LB has gone to press for an initial 21,000 copies.