[W]riter Harry Jaffe remembers when he contacted national publishers last summer to propose writing a book about Vermont U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
“The first response was, ‘Who’s he? Why are you wasting your time? It’s got a two-week shelf life.’”
This winter, Jaffe is having the last laugh.
The Washington, D.C., author of the new 240-page Regan Arts paperback “Why Bernie Sanders Matters” showed off his work to a standing-room-only crowd at Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore on Saturday night, then backtracked south to New York City to talk up the title on the CNN program “Reliable Sources” Sunday morning.
Jaffe couldn’t have predicted such success 40 years ago when, as a 20-something cub reporter at Vermont’s Rutland Herald newspaper, he first encountered the mop-topped socialist Sanders amid two clean-cut major party candidates in a 1976 Green Mountain gubernatorial debate.
“What’s fascinating to me is the entire Washington establishment — the political parties, pundits and press — thought Sanders was going to be gone within weeks,” Jaffe says today. “I was ignored along with Bernie. And then Iowa changed everything.”
Jaffe isn’t the only one promoting a book about Sanders — and benefiting from the candidate’s rising popularity.
Chelsea Green Publishing, of White River Junction, was the first to release a title — “The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America,” a collection from the candidate’s “ample public record of speeches, statements, and interviews” compiled by Jonathan Tasini — and has shipped out 35,000 copies, with several political organizations, unions and grass-roots groups buying the 176-page paperback in bulk.
“Bernie’s message has been rather consistent,” says Shay Totten, Chelsea Green’s communications director, “so what he has said in the past remains almost identical to what he’s saying today.”
Tasini, for his part, has been promoting the book during his travels to such early caucus and primary states as Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina and regular appearances on CNN.
“With the campaign’s expectation that it will keep going right up until the convention, we believe the book will retain relevance to people who are new to Bernie and want to know more,” Totten says. “We certainly hope to sell thousands more copies before the convention, and then who knows? Maybe we’ll need to have a revised edition ready for the general election this fall.”
The candidate himself also has a book — a new edition of his 1997 autobiography “Outsider in the House,” which Verso Books recently revised and reprinted under the new name “Outsider in the White House.”
The 368-page paperback — co-written with University of Vermont English professor Huck Gutman, who served as Sanders’ Senate chief of staff from 2006 to 2012 — includes a new afterword by the Nation magazine national affairs correspondent John Nichols, as well as an updated preface by the candidate.
So far “Outsider in the White House” is selling the best of all the titles, ranking 11th on Amazon.com’s “Elections & Political Process” list last week (above any other candidate and just below hardcover, Kindle and audio editions of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” by Jane Mayer, another former Rutland Herald reporter).
Close behind in 15th place: “The Essential Bernie Sanders,” which Chelsea Green reports is selling more copies than the company’s top book since 2012, “The Art of Fermentation,” described as “the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published.”
Jaffe’s “Why Bernie Sanders Matters,” the latest of the lot, could soon join those ranks, thanks to the author’s appearing not only on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily” show but also such far-flung global gigs as a radio call-in to Canada and television satellite connection to Turkey.
“The book has gotten a lot more attention,” Jaffe says. “There’s no question that people are waking up to the fact Sanders is going to be around and we better learn more about him.”
