Speech gives a boost to Obama’s ‘Dreams’

What a difference a few minutes on the world stage can make.

Witness the mercurial rise of Barack Obama, who before the Democratic National Convention was a little-known state senator from Illinois trying to win a U.S. Senate seat. Now he is a certified star, and it hasn’t done bad things for his long-out-of-print book either.

Nine years ago, Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” was published to good reviews and lackluster sales. The best estimate his publisher and agent can come up with is that it sold around 15,000 copies.

But after his rousing keynote address at the convention last week, the country is smitten with Obama-mania, and the Crown Publishing Group is racing to ship copies of the book to stores around the country. The first reprinting of nearly 50,000 books has been shipped out, and Crown is trying to determine how many more it may need for a second printing, which will contain a copy of his convention speech.

“What’s really gratifying is that as the months have passed, we’ve seen him become more and more visible, with booksellers’ enthusiasm rising and reaching a fever pitch after the speech,” said Rachel Klayman, a senior editor at Crown.

James Fugate, the owner of Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, said he remembered Obama’s book signing there nearly a decade ago, at which the books did not sell out. He said he has had a dozen or so calls asking when the book will be on sale again. Initially, he said, he didn’t order a large number of the reprints because he thought he still had two boxes of the originals stored away. But they were not found.

“I’ve looked high and low, and I think we finally decided to throw them out,” he said. He’s ordered more.

The story of the book -- how it came into being and how it came to be republished -- has some unexpected twists. It began when literary agent Jane Dystel read a newspaper account in 1990 of how Obama had become the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. Sensing a good story, Dystel contacted Obama. But it was years after that first meeting that Obama delivered the manuscript and years more before it was finally published in 1995.

“The thing that struck me was his writing, which was unbelievably gorgeous,” Dystel said.

But as often happens with good books, Obama’s did not come close to reaching bestseller status. And it might have remained that way if the young politician had not caught Klayman’s attention after he became the Democratic nominee in the Illinois Senate race. Klayman broached the idea of an Obama book a few days after he won the hard-fought primary.

But she also had a dim memory that a book by or about Obama already had been written. She checked Amazon.com, the nation’s leading online bookseller, only to discover that her own company was the publisher of “Dreams From My Father.” But there was no copy of it to be found, not even on the Crown shelves -- something Klayman said is not unusual for a book published so long ago.

She tried numerous booksellers before finally turning to Dystel, who got a copy from Obama. What Klayman found unusual is that it was actually a good read, the story of growing up in Hawaii as the son of a white American woman and a black African man.

“I haven’t read too many books by politicians that are as eloquent as his,” Klayman said. “I told him that if I were his speech writer, I’d be intimidated.”