"Mad Men" Gives O'Hara a Boost
By Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 8/12/2008 7:17:00 AM
It's not unhead of for a TV show to boost sales of a book, but poetry titles don't often get the spotlight treatment. Not so anymore. Meditations in an Emergency by poet and cult figure Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), published by Grove Press, has received a noticeble bump in sales after an appearance on the much-lauded AMC drama, Mad Men.
On the first episode of the show's second season--the series follows the members of a New York ad agency in the late 1950s and early '60s--which aired July 27, main character Don Draper notices someone reading Meditations in a bar, and a discussion about the book ensues. According to Eric Price, associate publisher at Grove/Atlantic, “year-to-date sales [of Meditations] is up 218%, mostly due to the Mad Men appearance.” Knopf’s recent publication of O’Hara’s Selected Poems, which was featured on the cover of the Times book review, was also a factor. “Having this happen was really quite amazing and wonderful,” said Price.
As of this afternoon, Meditations in an Emergency, one of several collections of O’Hara’s poems published by different houses, was #2,761 in Amazon’s sales rankings, and the book was actually sold out on the e-tailer. To give an example of typical poetry sales on Amazon, Notes from the Air (Ecco, 2007), a volume of selected poems by John Ashbery, arguably America’s most influential living poet, and a contemporary and friend of O’Hara’s, currently has an Amazon ranking of 370,436. The Niagara River (Grove, 2005), the most recent book by the newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, is ranked at 5,249.
Among poets, O’Hara, who was gay, a curator at MoMA and a brilliant talker, is not an unlikely candidate for a brush with pop culture-fame. An original member of a group of poets dubbed the New York School, O’Hara’s short, free verse poems use chatty, accessible language to describe the goings-on in hip mid-century New York. Art, films and love affairs were among his favorite topics. Legions of fans and students have read him for decades.
The edition of the book featured on the show was the original, first published by Grove in 1957.
