“I’m not sure a lot of people will come at midnight,” said the sales clerk who picked up the phone at Kramer Books when I called Thursday evening, wondering whether they were bracing for a crowd later that night.
The Dupont Circle store had just announced via Twitter that it would start selling the most talked-about book in D.C.—Michael Wolff’s tell-all account of Trump’s first year in office, Fire and Fury—nine hours ahead of other booksellers. Thanks to excerpts published online this week in New York magazine, the British edition of GQ, and a column by Wolff in theHollywood Reporter, Wolff’s reporting—particularly its raft of shock quotes from Steve Bannon—had overtaken the news cycle. Donald Trump issued statement Wednesday saying Bannon “lost his mind.” The White House denounced the book as “trash,” with Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggesting Breitbart drop Bannon over his comments. The controversy culminated Thursday in a “cease and desist” letter from the president’s personal attorney to Wolff and his publisher. Publisher Henry Holt instead moved up the on-sale date from the next week to the next morning.
There’d be a line by Friday’s 7:30 a.m. opening, the clerk who picked up the phone predicted, but the midnight showing will “probably depend on the weather,” she said. And then—with an edge of amused skepticism in her voice, as if to suggest your average reader might care less about what Steve Bannon says the president’s son did during the campaign than a D.C. reporter thinks he should—she proposed I just come see the crowd, or lack of one, for myself. So, I did. And for what sort of person are 300 pages of White House gossip worth staying up late on a work night?
Journalists, mostly. Some had come to get their hands on Wolff’s book for an early start on the next news day. Others came to record the spectacle of extracurricular political obsessives standing in line for an early look at what Wolff would reveal about their president.
A Post reporter zeroed in on the one of these rare normals at the head of the line, which had begun to form at about 11:20 p.m. and then multiplied until it took up two rooms by the time purchases began around midnight. Men, and one woman, carrying news cameras asked to interview everyone.
Time lapse of @kramerbooks selling #FireAndFury pic.twitter.com/fFGa7QQGNr
— The Weekly Standard (@weeklystandard) January 5, 2018
“Free press is free press,” a blonde woman in a teal parka told a videographer who’d minutes earlier asked the reporter ahead of us in line for an interview. He seemed satisfied with her answer, what sounded like a citizen’s defense of Wolff; he turned the camera from her and moved on.
Another interviewee, a young man in an American-flag knit cap, could be heard recalling the time he’d stood in line for the midnight release of a new Harry Potter book 15 years ago. In tonight’s adult version, one wonders, which villain is Voldemort: Trump or Bannon? And, either way, would that make Michael Wolff Harry? If so—if journalists are wizards—is everyone else a muggle?
While I wondered, a couple of BBC reporters politely tried to commence an interview with me. Was I going to stay up all night reading? Probably not all night, no—but I was heading home with my two new copies of Fire and Fury. Latecomers would not be so lucky, I later learned. They’d had 75 copies at Kramer Books, and sold every last one within the first 15 minutes, the Post’s Josh Dawsey tweeted shortly after I’d left. Quite a lot of them, naturally, to members of the press.
