'Da Vinci' topped only by 'Potter'

By Bob Minzesheimer
USA Today

This season's most common question at bookstores is: "Do you have anything like 'The Da Vinci Code'?"

So far, sales are topped only by J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

"The Da Vinci Code" is a publishing phenomenon, triggering debates about early Christianity and resulting in a prime-time special on ABC.

Nine months after publication, 4.5 million copies are in print. The book has propelled Brown's earlier novels onto the best-seller lists and is boosting dozens of other books, both novels and nonfiction, about religion, history and art.

In 20 years as a fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley says she has seen nothing like it. The only other novel that comes close, she says, is last year's surprise best seller, Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," which is narrated by a girl raped and murdered at 14.

"But "The Da Vinci Code" is outstretching that. Readers say it kept them up all night. It's the first novel in a long time that people want to lose sleep over."

"Code"'s popularity shows that "readers are clamoring for books which combine historic fact with a contemporary story line," says Carol Fitzgerald, president of Bookreporter.com, a Web site for book discussions. "They say, 'I like being able to learn something as well as read a story.' "

It is a novel, but Brown writes in an introductory note that "all descriptions of documents and secret rituals are accurate."

Scholars and theologians, both conservative and liberal, dispute that. Some even say Brown is anti-Catholic. But Doubleday publisher Stephen Rubin says "the accuracy questions have added to the celebrity of the book. People want to read it for themselves."

In a year of poor sales with adult hardcovers down 6 percent and paperbacks down 4 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, Brown is sending people to bookstores.

Hensley compiled a list of 90 related books — from Katherine Neville's "The Eight" to Singh Simon's "The Code Book "— and says those sales are up 25 percent. Some stores have tables of other books of interest for "Da Vinci Code" readers.

And Brown's earlier novels have been rediscovered. There were 17,000 paperback copies of "Digital Fortress" in March; now there are 266,000 with a mass-market edition of 1 million copies out next month.

The paperback of "The Da Vinci Code" isn't scheduled yet, Rubin says. First, he has his eyes on the record for a hardcover novel: "The Bridges of Madison County" with 6 million copies.

As for Brown, he's at home, somewhere in New Hampshire, on a one-month hiatus from interviews. He prefers to keep his hometown a secret.