Readers Rush to Snap Up Commission’s Paperback

Half a million copies of “The 9/11 Commission Report” arrived Thursday at bookstores across the country and many booksellers found themselves selling the $10 paperbacks almost as fast as they could unpack them.

Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena sold out by noon. Customers of Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., bought 60 copies in about four hours. The Tattered Cover in Denver didn’t get its shipment unpacked until close to 1 p.m., although reserve copies were sold before they reached the shelves.

In New York, before the commission held its news conference that coincided with the book’s release, customers flocked to bookstores up and down Manhattan.

Many had called days ahead to reserve copies and some waited patiently for the 11:30 a.m. start of sales.

At three Midtown bookstores, copies were displayed just inside the front doors and close to cashiers.

“I think [the commission] did a helluva job,” said John Dean, former White House counsel to President Nixon during the Watergate era.

“And I am anxious to read what they have done,” he said, while buying a copy of the 567-page report at Borders Books & Music on Park Avenue.

That store sold more than 40 copies in three hours; one rack had to be refilled three or four times, store employees said. Daryl Mattson, the Borders area marketing manager for Manhattan, said the report would be the day’s biggest seller.

“People have been swarming the front of stores,” he said, speaking from the Park Avenue store.

“We expected it to be popular in our Wall Street store, since the issue is very resonant with the downtown community and that is the closest store to ground zero. But it’s been big all over the city.”

The report hit the No. 1 spot on the Barnes & Noble online site and No. 2 on Amazon.com.

Book vendors had not been sure exactly when publisher W.W. Norton would ship the bound report, and most people didn’t know that it existed until a few days ago when news outlets began reporting it and some bookstore chains began alerting their customers.

“This is much more like an unfolding news story than a marketing event,” said Doug Dutton, proprietor of Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore.

“The 9/11 Commission Report,” he said, is a primary document of U.S. history much like the Pentagon Papers and the Warren Commission report (both of which have sold more than a million copies).

Sept. 11, he said, “was a television event, a visual event. This is the accompanying text.”

Virginia Harabin, floor manager for Politics and Prose in Washington, said the first day of sales seemed comparable to Richard A. Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” and Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack.”

“This is a serious crowd of thoughtful people,” Harabin said. “This doesn’t have the star power of the Clinton book, but these are people who are concerned with what is in the report.”

At Borders in Pasadena, Ted Hesselroth, a software developer at Caltech, said he bought a copy because it confirmed and clarified his suspicions about the attack.

“I thought it was due to negligence and I couldn’t put my finger on whose. Now I understand it was the CIA and the FAA,” he said, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration.

“It seems like both sides of the political spectrum have been posturing about the commission,” said Bob Conley, a business consultant.

“So I wanted to read directly about what the commission said.”

In New York, what propelled some people into the stores was more emotional than political. As she made her way with the book to the cashiers’ line at the Barnes & Noble in the Citicorp Center, Joan Dowd, who works for a company that sells TV advertising time, said she felt less safe since Sept. 11.

“You have to live,” she said. “I don’t consciously think about it very often. I try not to dwell on it. I know that we are less safe.”

Times staff writers Judy Chia Hui Hsu in Los Angeles and John J. Goldman in New York contributed to this report.