Sales Heat Up Along With War

Daniel Yergin’s book was wildly overdue, and Simon & Schuster was not happy. Yergin spent eight years writing “The Prize,” far longer than he expected. When the book was not ready for publication last fall, “we were tearing our hair out,” Simon & Schuster vice president Victoria Meyer said.

But without design on Simon & Schuster’s part, Yergin and “The Prize” hit the world-events jackpot. Since it was released in early December, “The Prize” has gone back to press seven times. Meyer said there are now “just a shade under 200,000 copies” in print of the book that traces the history of oil in the Middle East.

Yergin “provides a much-needed historical perspective,” Meyer said, and readers “are just hungry for any information” about the Middle East.

To judge by the demand for books that bear even a tangential connection to the Mideast, that hunger is closer to voraciousness. Serious political and historical tomes are selling in dazzling numbers; readers’ guides to weapons are flying off book dealers’ shelves; even fiction set in or near the Persian Gulf is finding a ravenous new audience.

The paperback edition of Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” offers a case in point. Anchor Books scheduled a second printing even before the book’s official publication date last August--just as American troops were deployed to the Persian Gulf. But since January, when the war began, “From Beirut to Jerusalem” has gone back to press six times. Ellen Archer, publicity director at Anchor, said that in January alone, more than 280,000 copies of the book by the double-Pulitzer Prize winner were sold.

Friedman’s book does not even deal with Kuwait, said Helene Atwan, vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the hardback publisher of “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” but “it explains the Middle East,” she said.

“That explains the appeal of all these books, not just ours,” said Annik LaFarge, associate publisher of Times Books. In October, after just 19 days of writing and production, Times Books released “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf” by New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Laurie Mylorie of Harvard University. That instant paperback did well in October through December, LaFarge said, “but it wasn’t blowing out of the stores the way it is now.”

The day after the fighting began, LaFarge said, Times Books received 15,000 orders for “Saddam Hussein” in a single hour. “People became saturated with television, and television revealed its somewhat cursory approach. People needed more substance.”

At Avon Books, the paperback edition of David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace” “has gone through the wall,” publicist Diane Mancher said. In December, before hostilities began, “basically it was a book people didn’t really care about,” Mancher said. But now “We can’t reprint them fast enough.”

Mancher said the appetite for books about the Mideast had helped older titles, such as Robert Lacy’s “The Kingdom,” as well as some novels. She said a fictional account of a war in the Middle East, “Force of Eagles,” “is doing much better than a book like this would have done” without the interest in the Persian Gulf area.

Bookstores greeted “Dragons at War: Land Battles in the Desert” with--”so far,” the publisher, Ivy, cautioned--a 450,000-copy advance order. The book by Daniel P. Bolger, a survivor of eight years in a Vietnamese prison camp, offers a detailed description of how Americans are trained for desert warfare. The book was published in hardcover in 1967 by Presidio Press, which specializes in military titles. Presidio had also published Bolger’s “Feast of Bones,” a novel about a Soviet army officer in Afghanistan. Ivy will publish “Feast of Bones” this fall.

The lust for news about every little detail of the conflict has produced two books about the arms in use in the Middle East. Col. Walter J. Boyne, USAF (ret.), signed a contract to write “Weapons of the Desert Storm” late on a Friday afternoon, and by the following Monday had faxed the entire book to his publisher, Signet. Signet also is publishing Boyne’s “Gulf War: A Comprehensive Guide to People, Places and Weapons,” which Boyne, the former director of the National Museum of Air and Space, wrote the week after he finished “Weapons.”

Boyne speculated that “in many ways, the immediacy of the reporting” was a key to the desire for information about this war. “It is almost like central casting,” Boyne said. “The pilots, the infantrymen, the engineers, the mechanics--these men and women are so personable. They’re giving this war a different dimension.”

Children, too, are watching those soldiers and those weapons. Concerns about how very young people are coping with their fears and feelings about this war prompted Workman Publishing to come out with “My Desert Storm Workbook: First Aid for Feelings.”

The book, geared to children under 10, first was published by the National Childhood Grief Institute in Minneapolis. Peter Workman spotted the workbook on a trip to Minneapolis and turned it into his publishing company’s first instant book. Workman’s Andrea Bass Glickson said that by the time the book was on the press, Workman had taken orders for 90,000 copies.

Some publishers are rushing Mideast titles into print. “Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Baathist Iraq, 1968-1989” by Amatzia Baram was published this month by St. Martin’s, and not in April, as originally scheduled.

While no one wants the war to continue, some publishers are hoping that the interest in the Middle East will last for some time. In April, the Free Press, known for what publicist Suzanne Herz calls “intense nonfiction,” will publish “Saddam Hussein,” a political biography that has been in the works for three years. The book is written by Efraim Karsh, a former Israeli military-affairs officer who teaches at Kings College in London, and Inari Rautsi of the University of Helsinki. Herz calls the 50,000 first-print run for “Saddam” “enormous” by Free Press standards.

But even without the new titles, the Mideast book list is booming. Jean P. Sasson’s “The Rape of Kuwait” (Knightsbridge) is selling in huge quantities. “Republic of Fear” by Samir Al-Khalil is selling well in its Pantheon paperback as well as in its University of California hardback. “The Arabs” (Vintage), from David Lamb, is in demand.

Persian Gulf book lists are cropping up everywhere. “Good Morning America” recommended 10 books. National Public Radio lists 19. All told, the Ingram Book Co. gave 71 titles on its “Gulf Crisis Title Listing” sheet. But keep checking, Ingram warned booksellers; new titles may be added daily.