The book quest that comes with a Da Vinci Code twist
When Chloe Gordon tried to buy an obscure early work by mega-selling Dan Brown, she took on a search that Robert Langdon himself would be proud of, writes Caity Weaver
Chloe Gordon, a 32-year-old filmmaker, describes herself as “a person who somewhat ironically engages” with the work of novelist Dan Brown. She has read all but one of the eight books Brown has published under his name.
So when she stumbled upon an internet rumour that identified Brown as the author of a tongue-in-cheek dating guide from 1995 called 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, she immediately ordered it from Amazon.
The 96-page novelty book, originally published under the name Danielle Brown, promised very short descriptions of men the author considered unsuitable romantic partners – a book of red flags, if you will. “Men who think Lamaze is a famous French car race,” for example. “Men who decoupage.” “Men with pet rocks.”
But when she opened her mail, Gordon realised that the wrong book had arrived (Heretics of Dune, a 1984 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert). She forgot about it for a year or so and then went on Amazon and ordered the book again. This time she received Elizabeth Taylor’s 1988 dieting memoir, Elizabeth Takes Off.
Having struck out twice on Amazon, Gordon tried eBay. She paid a seller for the book, and a few days later received a refund and an email explaining that the book did not exist in the seller’s inventory. She ordered a copy from a different seller. This order, too, was cancelled and refunded.
Gordon, who lives in California, did not give up. She ordered the book on AbeBooks, a subsidiary of Amazon. Once again, she did not receive 187 Men to Avoid but, this time, The Ghost Light by Fritz Leiber.
If I’m using my Dan Brown brain, it’s obviously Dan Brown putting the bar codes on fake books so that no one ever sees this really embarrassing book that he wrote in the Nineties
She began to anticipate receiving wrong books. On 19 July, she filmed herself opening her most recent Amazon package, which turned out to be a copy of Bill Cosby’s 1992 musings on youth, Childhood, and posted it on Twitter. “Oh no,” she groans. “This is worse — it’s getting worse!”
“This breaks my brain every day,” Gordon says by telephone on the afternoon her unsolicited copy of Cosby’s book arrives. Every book she receives appears to have the same bar code printed on its cover — and most of the books’ back covers featured an additional stick-on label from their resellers insistently identifying them as 187 Men to Avoid. Every label was patently untrue.
And why did the error appear to extend to every independent secondhand seller, too? “I still, to this day – I have no proof that this book is real or exists,” Gordon says.
Information about the slim, square-shaped book is difficult to come by. But both the original 1995 edition and a Berkley Trade reprint published in 2006 are listed on various places online. The covers are almost identical – a pigeon-toed blond cartoon woman in a cherry red coat and floppy hat clutches herself protectively as she stands before a large assembly of suited men. The 2006 reprint amends the cover text to read, “Early Humor
from the Author of The Da Vinci Code,” and recasts the author as “Dan Brown Formerly Writing As Danielle Brown.”
Data from NPD BookScan, which has tracked book sales data since the early 2000s, shows that the 2006 edition has sold about 1,200 copies.
“There’s not really a version of this that totally makes sense,” Gordon says. “If I’m using my Dan Brown brain, it’s obviously Dan Brown putting the bar codes on fake books so that no one ever sees this really embarrassing book that he wrote in the Nineties.”
Proof of existence
In 1995, the year 187 Men to Avoid was published, Brown was working as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and he had begun writing his first novel: the thriller Diǀtal Fortress.
His circumstances overlapped neatly with the author bio of 187 Men to Avoid: “Danielle Brown currently lives in New England — teaching school, writing books, and avoiding men.”
In Lisa Rogak’s second unauthorised biography of Brown, Dan Brown: The Unauthorized Biography (a 2013 follow-up to The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown, published in 2005), it is suggested that Brown had written 187 Men to Avoid with his future ex-wife Blythe Brown.
According to Rogak, the couple, who were not yet married at the time 187 Men to Avoid was published, had found inspiration for the book in “the ludicrous characters and dating and mating methods of the men and women they had witnessed” while living in Los Angeles.
Rogak’s research also turned up a rare public acknowledgment from Brown of 187 Men to Avoid, given in an interview about his novel Angels and Demons, which was published in 2000.
The interview, which was published on The Book Review Cafe, a defunct website, includes this quotation from Brown: “Yes, I did write a book before Diǀtal Fortress. It was a silly little humour book whose title will forever remain a secret! The book, I believe, is now out of print (rightly so).”
Brown’s publisher said he was unavailable for comment for this article. A publicist for Brown said she was also unavailable for comment.
Despite Brown’s wish for secrecy, 187 Men to Avoid has been a detail on his Wikipedia page since January 2006.
To err is human
We can say, then, that 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman is the work of Dan Brown, and possibly, to some degree, Blythe Brown, now his former wife, but then his future wife. (The extent to which Blythe Brown was a collaborator on Dan Brown’s books has been a matter of much litigation.)
But the identity of the book’s author does not itself explain why Gordon received so many other books that are being sold online under its title.
The book Gordon received from her first purchase attempt came from a company called ZBK Books — an Amazon reseller that operates out of three northern New Jersey facilities.
Reached by phone, the owner of ZBK Books, Shirzad Zarei, was apologetic about the mix-up. He was also confident he could explain how it had happened. The mystery, he says, was most likely set in motion the first time someone – anywhere – listed
187 Men to Avoid for resale online. Like the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci as imagined and explicated by Brown, this issue stemmed from a code hidden in plain sight: the book’s bar code.
Bar codes help businesses track inventory and sales. In the case of books, the bar code is a graphical representation of a numerical sequence called an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN – different combinations of 13 digits that identify published books, including alternate versions of themselves. (Hardcover editions of The Da Vinci Code have a different ISBN than paperbacks, for instance.)
When a book is listed for online resale for the first time, the data the seller enters about the title can become the default information generated for all future scans of its unique ISBN. (If other sellers subsequently notice an error, they can report the listing as incorrect.)
“The first person that tried to sell it used probably just entered some wrong information,” Zarei says of 187 Men to Avoid.
Because unaffiliated resellers are working from the same shared book data, Zarei says. “If one of us is making the error, everyone is making it.”
A glitch in the matrix
While Zarei was able to explain how the error had flourished like a weed in the online book reselling ecosystem, he could not determine the basic question of its existence: Why had so many books been printed with what appeared to be the exact same bar code?
“That’s certainly not what we would call best practice,” says Brian O’Leary, the executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade association.
Although the books mailed to Gordon were as unalike as members of the nightshade family, close inspection turned up trace similarities. All of the books were published between 1984 and 1995. All were published by GP Putnam’s Sons or its paperback affiliate at the time, Berkley Books.
The common lineage led O’Leary to speculate that the reused bar codes may have been the result of “a production problem” at the publisher level.
It’s virtually impossible to know how many books have this particular bar code, according to O’Leary. In other words, if
Gordon sticks to her current strategy, there is no way to know how many online orders for 187 Men to Avoid she will have to place before she receives the correct item. It’s possible none of the sellers will ever possess this book again, despite what their internal records show.
Still, she remains optimistic that she will acquire it eventually. “I have to stay positive,” she says. “I’m going to get this book if I have to go to New Hampshire and pry it out of Dan Brown’s hands.”
This article oriǀnally appeared in The New York Times
Want your views to be included in The Independent Daily Edition letters page? Email us by tapping here letters@independent.co.uk. Please include your address
BACK TO TOP