Book on Trump sells out quickly at Victoria shops

It only took 20 minutes Friday for Munro’s Books in Victoria to sell out of Michael Wolff’s controversial new volume on the Trump presidency.

The store’s staff no sooner unpacked Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House than it disappeared from the shelves, said Jessica Walker.

“There hasn’t been a response to a political book like this for a while,” said Walker, a managing partner at the bookstore.

“We had already increased our order a couple of weeks ago in anticipation — just because I kept reading things in The Guardian.

“But, obviously, once the Master of Twitter gets involved … there was just such an escalation in the last couple of days.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to block the book’s publication, his Twitter attacks against Wolff, and the publisher’s decision to move up the release date to Friday only stoked reader interest.

Fire and Fury rocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list Friday and Munro’s posted a picture of the book on Twitter, saying: “By the time you read this, we’ll likely be sold out.”

Walker said most people who were able to get their hands on the book had called the store to reserve a copy in advance.

“It’s been an exciting day,” she said, noting that customers are usually rather blasé when she telephones to let them know that a book has arrived in the shop.

“Everyone that I phoned this morning … said: ‘I’ll be there in 15 minutes,’ or: ‘I’m just heading downtown, I’ll be right there.’ So a lot of interest.”

It was a similar story across town at Bolen Books.

“A lot of people have been coming in, thinking that it’s here, but of course we’re sold out of them already,” said Vaughn Naylor, promotions co-ordinator.

“Anybody who has called in has [put] theirs on hold.

“So, yeah, it’s been selling like wildfire.”

Erin Simpson, a bookseller at Ivy’s Bookshop in Oak Bay, said the sudden surge in demand was unlike anything she had seen before.

“The thing about this one is there wasn’t the anticipation,” she said. “It wasn’t a long build-up to it like with the next release of a novel that someone has long awaited.

“Obviously, it was huge but it was almost overnight huge. Whereas we’re used to having people on a waitlist for a long time and then we get several dozen [books] in and they’re gone very quickly. “This one kind of came out of the blue.”

Munro’s expects more copies of the book next week and all the stores have submitted orders to replenish stocks as soon as possible.

“I was actually quite surprised that even stores in Washington, D.C., didn’t have huge numbers of the book on order,” Walker said.

“There’s definitely more interest than we’ve seen for quite a long time.”