Thank you, Carrie Bradshaw!

I'm a fan of Kessinger Publishing. The company is one of the keepers of all those esoteric titles on Egyptian magic and Rosicrucianism that you'd never expect to find unless you happened to be browsing the shelves at Dan Brown's house. When you order a book from this company, you get a reproduction of the text as it originally appeared--not a new version cleaned up and reformatted in a modern typeface. Sometimes there are smudges and even missing pages, but I prefer this the way friends of mine like to read well-thumbed thrift store copies of their favorite authors instead of brand-new copies. It doesn't matter if you order "A Primer of Natal Astrology" or Wilkie Collins' "Alicia Warlock" — all of Kessinger's books arrive at your door in that same awful, mustard-yellow packaging.

OK, so you get the idea that this publisher is about 100 miles away from the mainstream, right? And yet, the Associated Press reports that the publisher has enjoyed an unexpected surge in sales thanks to ... yes, you are reading this correctly ... the movie "Sex and the City." The character of Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading the book "Love Letters From Great Men," and, quicker than you can say "product placement," audience-goers scoured the Internet for this book, which is fictional, and found instead a 1920s book published by Kessinger: "Love Letters From Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day." As of this afternoon, that 80-year-old book ranks at No. 129 on Amazon.com.

Nick Owchar

Comments

[Steve]

Funny that you mention Kessinger Publishing. BookSquare just linked to an article about their involvement in copyright infringement. Timely and well worth the read: http://tinyurl.com/633e2o

[Ruth]

I purchased a Kessinger Publishing book, "The Diseases of China: Including Formosa And Korea". I'd wanted a copy of this book for years. Unfortunately, the scan quality is so poor that 30% of the pages are unreadable, and ALL the photos in the book are on the poor quality pages. So the book is useless to me. It's not the original copy of the book that was in a deteriorated quality; it's definitely the scanning quality because the pages are covered in a uniform grid of dots obscuring the photos and text. I'd still like a good copy of this book, but I'll never buy another Kessinger Publishing print-on-demand book without seeing it first.