Posted on March 3, 2022 at 2:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Two books are being celebrated in the Guardian for flying off shelves, when such a phenomenon wasn't exactly expected.
The more bizarre story comes out of Canada by way of the United States, where a popular TikTok user named Ohmarni lives.
Ohmarni told her followers that she'd dreamed of being asked "is the fifth window open?" and that she'd subsequently sought to find what that meant.
It led her to the 2000 poetry collection The Fifth Window, which had relatively few copies available.
The poems' author, Canada's Russell Thornton, kindly sent her a few copies, and she continued to feature his work in her TikTok videos — prompting his publisher to issue a reprint to meet this sudden demand.
Thornton shared his reaction to this unexpected fame with the Guardian.
Somewhat less surprising, but no less newsworthy, is the popularity of 1944's Capitalism and Slavery.
The book, described by the Guardian as containing "unpalatable truths about Britain's slave trade," was written by Eric Williams, an author who later served as the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
A UK publisher initially told him that he would never publish such a book, though it did eventually come out in the UK in 1964.
But Penguin Random House recently reissued it in mass-market paperback, and it sold almost 3,000 copies in its first few days — landing it on the Sunday Times paperback nonfiction chart.
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Categories: Today in Books