DaVinci…DaWhat?

Okay…so I’ve held off reading “The DaVinci Code” and also have not yet seen the movie. Maybe it’s just for the sake of saying, “Nope, not read it. Not seen it.” (Why, I don’t know, because eventually I’ll probably go for it.) I’m a big movie fan, so it’s hard to resist running out to the nearest theater to join the masses that had to be among the first in the seats. As a book seller, I’ll admit to carrying a few copies of the famous-and-debated work of fiction. Yes, yes. I do have to give the customers what they want—that’s simply smart business sense.

In my own way, I was playing a silent game with my customers. “The DaVinci Code” copies were carefully positioned in different places on my “bestseller” rack at different book fairs. At one event, I’d place them on the top shelves to see how fast they sold. The next time, I’d position the book toward the bottom to see just how badly people wanted it—if they had to search for it, would they still buy the book? Did that embossed, golden title jump off the dark-red cover enough to trip people as they walked by, out of immediate view? Buried between Jimmy Carter’s “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis” and Frank Peretti’s “Monster,” I thought perhaps those titles might instead catch a shopper’s gaze, who in turn, would have a hard decision to make, choosing between the three types of ethical discussions.

What I noticed was that during the week preceding the movie debut, the DaVinci copies did not sell—and that was when the book was placed on the top shelves of the rack. I’d wondered if people had gotten bored by the voluminous clamber on the airwaves about Dan Brown’s legal predicament. Tom Hanks’s promotion of the movie was a bit overdone too (I thought), as he appeared on every television channel most nights, gushing over the merits of his new film.

However, after “The DaVinci Code” premiered in theaters, the copies of the book went quickly…sold right away. I had a single hardback remaining when a man who had seen it displayed the day before came back to buy it, but it was gone—sold to someone who had been there an hour before.

I haven’t seen a man that age pout so sadly in quite a while! Maybe he should just go see the movie…