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Books

Big Book Bandwagon Barrels on

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published March 26, 2006

Three years after its initial publication and with over 60-million copies in circulation, The Da Vinci Code is finally coming out in paperback. Not because sales of the novel in the higher-priced hardback format have been exhausted, as is usually the case. The Da Vinci Code, after all, still clocked in last week at No. 3 on the hardback New York Times bestseller list, which includes sales of the book's illustrated (and even more expensive) version published in 2004.

No, the paperback version of The Da Vinci Code is being issued this week in anticipation of an even larger audience for the modern Holy Grail story: The movie version of Dan Brown's blockbuster, starring Tom Hanks, is due out in May.

The Da Vinci Code - which is also available on audio CDs - has become more than just a popular book about secrets hidden in Renaissance paintings. It has become poster boy for the publishing industry's own holy grail:

Marketing synergy.

"You can decry this as a crime against literature or accept it as the way of the world, but the fact remains: Selling books is about more than just talent and luck. It's about marketing," says Bob Thompson, who covers publishing for the Washington Post.

Random House has profited handsomely from giving The Da Vinci Code the big book, big movie treatment. Thanks to a mention in Brown's book, sales of another Random title, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, were boosted, so much so that in 2005 Random House reissued the nonfiction work in its own illustrated edition.

Never mind that two of the three authors of Holy Blood are suing Brown, claiming he stole his plot from them. "As the British say, where there's a hit, there's a writ," Suzanne Herz, the Random House publicist for the The Da Vinci Code hardcover, sanguinely comments. After all, the trial's publicity has whet the public's appetite for both books. And can it be a coincidence that The Jesus Papers, an embargoed sequel to Holy Blood, goes on sale Tuesday, the release date of the mass-market paperback edition of The Da Vinci Code?

Meanwhile, the media has happily cashed in on Da Vinci mania. Titles on Mary Magdalene, medieval secret societies such as the Templars and gnosticism have reached, well, biblical proportions. At least four books have been published devoted to exposing errors in The Da Vinci Code, and there's even a weight loss book - Stephen Lanzalotta's The Diet Code - that claims to offer "revolutionary weight loss secrets from da Vinci and the Golden Ratio."

Where there was a hit, now there is a whole industry of da Vinci lit.

The most recent novels with Holy Grail themes include Steve Berry's The Templar Legacy, No. 6 last week on the New York Times fiction bestseller list; Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar, also about long-lost medieval treasure, at No. 7; and, climbing to No. 12, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth. (See story, below)

While these authors no doubt would claim they did not set out to write a Da Vinci clone, they can't be unhappy that publishers, lured by dollar signs (the most important symbol, as it turns out, in The Da Vinci Code world), are paying more attention. Labyrinth spent 14 weeks on the United Kingdom's hardcover bestseller list last year and recently topped the paperback list there. Now Putnam is giving its entry into the Holy Grail sweepstakes the big book treatment on this side of the puddle. According to Thompson, Mosse was "flown across the Atlantic five months before publication to lunch with New York press types" and "escorted to a Manhattan lunch with Sessalee Hensley, the influential Barnes & Noble fiction buyer known for helping launch Code with a huge order."

Meanwhile, indignation over the "lies" told in a work of fiction - whether they are trivial missteps, like the fact that nearly all the streets Brown has his characters traverse across Paris are wrong, or involve matters of more theological import - comes in no small part from Brown's own claim to factual accuracy. Under the headline FACT, he writes: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." This dubious assertion has only served to encourage readers to accept everything in the novel as true and all but beg naysayers to prove him wrong.

Believing historical novels to be literally true, however, is nothing new, as Sharan Newman points out in The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code (Berkeley Trade Paperback, 2005), the most engaging and accessible of the many book-length rebuttals of The Da Vinci Code. "The people of the Middle Ages tended to put their faith in novels, too, especially in the case of the quintessential Western legend, that of King Arthur," says Newman, a medieval scholar who also has penned several medieval French mysteries. Even medieval writers, offering competing stories about the Holy Grail, denounced the writings of their rivals as "rubbish" and "nonsense."

None of these stories, of course, are new. In 1965, The Passover Plot purported to "prove" that Jesus planned his own arrest and never died on the cross. It became a bestseller. Nikos Kazantzakis' 1951 novel The Last Temptation of Christ, which hinted at a romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, was turned into a film by Martin Scorsese in 1988.

What is new is the amplification these stories receive thanks to the constant drumbeat of media attention, whether for The Da Vinci Code and its clones or for the enormously popular Left Behind series, whose fundamentalist viewpoint is at the opposite end of the continuum of religious sentiment.

In other words, to paraphrase a line from Leigh Teabing, the character in Brown's book who carries the lofty label "British royal historian" (a title, by the way, that doesn't exist):

The Da Vinci Code is simply the greatest story ever sold.

[Last modified March 25, 2006, 09:46:03]