A Publishing Phenomenon

Mark Twain’s Autobiography Flying Off the Shelves
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: November 19, 2010

When editors at the University of California Press pondered the possible demand for “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir, they kept their expectations modest with a planned print run of 7,500 copies.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain” is a smash hit across the country.
Now it is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.

“It sold right out,” said Kris Kleindienst, an owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which first ordered 50 copies and has a dozen people on a waiting list. “You would think only completists and scholars would want a book like this. But there’s an enduring love affair with Mark Twain, especially around here. Anybody within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi River has a Twain attachment.”

Farther upriver, at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Paul Ingram, the book buyer, said he initially ordered 10 copies, but they disappeared almost immediately.

“We are dearly hoping we’ll get more copies in a couple of weeks,” Mr. Ingram said. “I’m sure every bookseller in the world is saying, ‘I should have been sharper, I should have thought this one through more carefully.’ ”

Earlier this week, the book was out of stock at a handful of Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Boston and Austin, Tex. On Borders.com, it is back-ordered for at least two to four weeks. Some independent booksellers said they had been told, much to their despair, that they would not receive reorders until mid-December or even January.

“It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla. “In this age of instant books, why does it take so long to reprint it?”

Those who have been lining up to buy it seem to be a mix of Twain aficionados, history buffs and early Christmas shoppers who gravitate toward big, heavy classic biographies as gifts.

“It’s totally the Dad book of the year,” said Rebecca Fitting, an owner of the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “It’s that autobiography, biography, history category, a certain kind of guy gift book.”

Many booksellers said the memoir has a perfect holiday-gift quality: a widely adored author, a weighty feel, and a unique story behind its publication. (Twain ordered that the book be published a century after his death.)

Most of the content was dictated to Twain’s stenographer in the four years before he died, at 74 in 1910. It is more political than his previous works, by turns frank, funny, angry and full of recollections from his childhood, which deeply influenced books like “Huckleberry Finn.”

A younger generation of readers is discovering Twain for his political writings, Ms. Fitting said.

“He’s surprisingly relevant right now,” she added. “When you look at how much he wrote and the breadth of the subjects he wrote about, you know that if he were alive today, he would totally be a blogger.”

Steve Kettmann, an American writer living in Berlin, said that he tried to buy a copy during a visit to a Borders in Orlando, Fla., but was told that they were sold out and would not receive more copies for four to six weeks. (He went to another Borders nearby, found two copies, and bought them both.)

“I just think that there’s a feeling out there by a lot of people that Mark Twain is one of our greatest writers, and there’s something particularly American about his combination of wit and insight,” Mr. Kettmann said. “He was a wonderful showman. And he was cool, let’s face it. That’s part of it.”

Alex Dahne, a spokeswoman for the University of California Press, said the book was the biggest success the publisher has had in 60 years.

The first print run of “Autobiography” was for 50,000 copies. Thomson-Shore, a small printer in Michigan that is producing the books, has been working overtime and is now producing 30,000 copies a week. To speed up delivery, the printer found bigger-than-usual trucks to carry books to warehouses in Richmond, Calif., and Ewing, N.J. — the trucks carry 10,000 copies instead of the usual 7,000.

The book will reach the No. 7 spot on The New York Times’s hardcover nonfiction best-seller list to be published on Nov. 28, its fourth week on the list. On Friday afternoon it was No. 4 on the BN.com best-seller list, behind “Decision Points,” former President George W. Bush’s memoir; the latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” an illustrated children’s novel by Jeff Kinney; and “Unbroken,” a prisoner-of-war’s story by Laura Hillenbrand.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain” received a huge lift from excerpts in Granta, Newsweek, Playboy and Harper’s Magazine, and a burst of early media coverage this summer, well in advance of the official Nov. 15 publication date. The publisher created an eye-catching Web site, thisismarktwain.com, complete with audio, black-and-white photos and a timeline of Twain’s life. (Two more 600-page volumes are planned.)

Edward Ash-Milby, a buyer for Barnes & Noble, said the book had already emerged as one of the hottest of the holiday season.

“I believe it has a certain cachet, a gift of quality that says a lot about the giver as well as the recipient,” Mr. Ash-Milby said in an e-mail. “It’s literary, but not too tough to read. The content, itself, is immensely readable, although nonlinear. It can be easily picked up and read in spots without the worry of plot lines or continuity.”

Booksellers seemed to agree that the memoir, which has letters, diary entries, pictures and nearly 200 pages of “explanatory notes,” is a book to be read in small bites.

“I’ve barely had a chance to look at it, but from what I did see, it looked like the kind of book you would never finish, and you would never even think of reading start to finish,” said Mr. Ingram of Prairie Lights. “But it’s the kind of book you would read a little bit of every day of your life.”

While many booksellers were caught flat-footed by the intense interest in the book, others said they saw it coming. The book is currently available at Amazon.com and BN.com. At BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn, booksellers initially ordered 100 copies, the general manager, Zack Zook, said.

“We felt from the beginning that it was a title which our neighborhood would gravitate heavily toward,” Mr. Zook said. “There’s genuine interest there. It’s been on our best-seller list now for weeks.”

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., ordered 600 copies and has already sold 500. Six hundred more books are on the way.

Ms. Dahne of the University of California Press said the publisher was rushing to get copies to bookstores and promised that they would be there in time for the holidays.

“We feel like, wow, America’s kind of excited about a literary icon,” she said. “There’s something very sweet about the fact that people are interested in a 736-page scholarly tome about Mark Twain.”