Demand for the book has been “Fury”-ous, so local library patrons will have to wait a while to check out the best-seller by Michael Wolff.
The Fort Vancouver Regional Library District has ordered 67 copies of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, ” by Michael Wolff.
However, “We have not yet received the book,” Jan Johnston, collection manager, said Friday.
At that point, there were 220 “holds,” or readers on a waiting list for the book.
“We’re not the only ones,” Johnston said. She recently talked with a counterpart at the Multnomah County library system.
“Multnomah County had received six copies, and holds were at 1,000,” she said. “They have 250 more copies on order.”
There are alternate formats that don’t require putting ink on paper, and some of those versions are available through Fort Vancouver. There are waiting lists for them, too.
“We have 25 copies of the e-book and 10 of the e-audio,” she said. “We have 129 holds on the e-book and 53 holds on the e-audio.”
(The two formats have different shelf lives, by the way. Fort Vancouver owns its e-audio copies. The district will have to renew each e-book after two years or 52 checkouts, whichever comes first.)
There is a path to a quick read, but you have to be lucky. Once the “Fire and Fury” books are in the collection, a few copies will be placed on “Lucky Day” shelves in local branches. That’s where best-sellers and high-visibility books are available for the lucky reader who sees them first.
National coverage indicates that it’s pretty much the same story in all libraries — even the big systems. Publisher’s Weekly reported that the Chicago Public Library had more than 800 holds on Jan. 7, and no print books; the Boston Public Library had 236 holds and no print copies.
Librarians have had a hard time coming up with a comparable situation. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series featured high-demand titles, but the franchise didn’t ramp up this quickly.
“This was a shooting star,” Johnston said. “(‘Fire and Fury’) caught the publisher by surprise.”
Rowling’s résumé does include one book that might be in the ballpark, Johnston noted after consulting with a colleague. In 2013, Rowling wrote a crime novel (“The Cuckoo’s Calling”) under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
“That caught us by surprise. The publisher was really secretive about who wrote it,” Johnston said. Eventually, Rowling’s authorship was revealed “and there was a big demand.”
