Pope, papacy rocket to top of bestseller lists

As the princes of the Roman Catholic Church convene in Vatican City to bury their leader and choose his successor, books by and about the late Pope John Paul II are rocketing up bestseller lists amid a flurry of press releases about upcoming works, including at least one biography of the new pope, who has yet to be named.

Two books by Pope John Paul II himself ranked in the top 10 on Tuesday morning at online retailers Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, including “Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium,” which publisher Rizzoli rushed into print in the United States last month as the pontiff’s health began to fail. It had been scheduled for release late this month.

And one of the pope’s most successful biographers, George Weigel, flew to Rome over the weekend to serve double duty as a commentator for NBC and to research a sequel to his 1999 international bestseller, “Witness to Hope.”

“I want to do a book that paints a portrait of the church after John Paul II, the church he left behind, if you will, and the challenges for the church in the 21st century, the new pope, and what he will bring to addressing those challenges,” Weigel said.

Sales of Weigel’s earlier biography also spiked over the last week, rising from 2,701st to 16th Tuesday morning on the ranking at Amazon.com.

“There’s an enormous amount of interest in this all over the country and indeed all over the world,” Weigel said. “I think it’s a great sign of the vitality of Catholicism that this kind of interest exists.”

To feed that interest, Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena ordered extra copies of papal books as reports of the pope’s worsening condition spread. Clerks erected a special display last week, and sales were brisk over the weekend, said promotions director Jennifer Ramos, although she could not specify how many books they had sold.

“There’s no one particular book” selling more than others, she said, “but ‘Memory and Identity’ has sold a good amount.”

Publishers hope the interest continues as they rush to put out books over the next year chronicling a transition that has not occurred for a quarter of a century: the installation of a new pope.

Among the planned books are two May releases from Doubleday: a collection of writings by whomever is elected pope, to be compiled by Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, and a biography of the new pope and his selection, to be written by John L. Allen Jr., a National Catholic Reporter writer and Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public Radio.