McCOURT'S NEW COURT
'Tis no surprise that Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes hits PW's trade paperback chart after just a week in the stores. The hardcover of his stirring memoir enjoyed a run of 106 weeks, 17 of them in the #1 spot. More than 2.5 million copies have been sold in the U.S. alone. For the trade paper edition, Touchstone went out with a 750,000-copy first printing. The publisher plans a two-tiered print and electronic ad campaign. The launch includes spots on Today, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline and the evening and late-night news in major markets, and print ads in daily newspapers. In early fall Touchstone plans more print ads and TV spots, on the CNN and A&E networks. The latter will piggy-back with the fall release of McCourt's next memoir installment, 'Tis.

GOOD GIRL HUNTING
One of last year's bestselling debut novels, Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding, has inspired several 30-ish women to pen tales of the joys and perils of dating. The first of these post-Bridget books to score is The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, seven interlinked stories by Melissa Banks. Great reviews, including a boxed, starred one from PW, helped, as did being published by Viking -- the house that made Bridget a resounding success. There was lots of prepub buzz on this book, including first serials in Cosmopolitan and Z trope (a small literary magazine owned by Francis Ford Coppola, who assigned Banks a story that got the ball rolling for Hunting). Banks and Fielding will do a panel in New York City on June 15, discussing "what do single girls want." It's one of the stops on a 16-city tour that will keep Banks on the road for much of June and July. Back on May 20, Viking's New York marketing staff and sales reps in other parts of the U.S. distributed to their accounts copies of the book, plus a poster, cardboard dolls and gummy fish, for what the publisher called "Opening Day of Hunting and Fishing." Total in print: 109,000 after four trips to press.

Meanwhile, Bridget Jones's Diary lands on our trade paper list; Penguin reports a total of 510,000 copies in print after two trips to press. Bridget enjoyed a hardcover run of 16 weeks on PW's charts.

NO BETRAYAL
Regnery notes that Bill Gertz's Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security is its fastest-selling bestseller. The book moves up from #9 to #5 in its second week on our charts and boasts 150,000 copies in print after five trips to press. Gertz did a tremendous number of radio and TV interviews, including G. Gordon Liddy's show, CNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and an upcoming airing of C-SPAN's Booknotes. Rush Limbaugh broke his longstanding "no guest" rule when he had Gertz on his show May 20.

HARRY RIDES HIGH
It looks like everyone's favorite boarding school student, Harry Potter, won't be suffering from a sophomore slump. His latest adventure, the long-awaited Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Scholastic/ Levine), in which Harry starts his second year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was released on June 2 with 490,000 copies after three prepub printings. Author J.K. Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, flew to New York City to tape appearances on CBS This Morning and the Rosie O'Donnell Show; she has already been interviewed by Newsweek, People and Nickelodeon.

Harry Potter has been a huge phenomenon in the U.K. since initial publication in July 1998, and he has proven just as popular on this side of the Atlantic. The first title in the projected seven-book series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which Scholastic published last September, currently has 601,000 hardcover copies in print after 19 printings.

The third installment, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, will pub September 8 with a first printing of 500,000; in October, Rowling will embark on a three-week U.S. tour.


With reporting by Diane Roback.