Library users clamour for Trump tell-all book
More than 2,000 on Toronto system’s waiting list to read Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury
Toronto Public Library users are displaying furious demand — like, really, really, really huge demand — for the new Donald Trump book.
On Thursday afternoon, there were 2,287 names on the waiting list to borrow a Toronto Public Library copy of journalist Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, the explosive White House tell-all tome that Trump, the U.S. president, failed to quash.
New York Public Library, by comparison, was showing 1,943 holds.
Toronto’s library system has 29 copies in circulation but, to satisfy the clamour, has ordered a total of 330 plus 150 ebooks.
“We don’t have a firm date on when we will receive them,” library spokesperson Ana-Maria Critchley said of the 301hard copies on order.
New York-based publisher Holt and Company rushed publication amid Trump’s publicity-stoking threats of legal action. He has denounced the book as fiction.
Fire and Fury quotes members of Trump’s inner circle, including former chief strategist Steve Bannon, conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and even the president’s daughter Ivanka, mocking or insulting the president, who is portrayed as a narcissistic man-child.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the book sold more than 29,000 hardcover copies, and more than 250,000 electronic versions, in its first week.
Caught off guard by its popularity, Holt boosted the 150,000-copy print run to more than one million.
Rakuten Kobo, the Toronto-based ebook retailer, says Fire and Fury set a record last Friday for biggest oneday sales of a non-fiction title in the company’s history.
Toronto Public Library says other books with long waiting lists in recent years include Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing in November 2016; The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapeña one year earlier; The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins in April 2015; Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in April 2014; and, in February 2014, Crazy Town, then-Star reporter Robyn Doolittle’s account of the scandal-mired mayoralty of Rob Ford.