One breakout of the holiday book-buying season just may be an elaborate, richly illustrated tome that records the dreams and spiritual questing of an author who has been dead for nearly half a century. The list price for the nine-pound, 416-page volume? $195.
“The Red Book” by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, has surprised booksellers and its publisher, W.W. Norton & Co., by bucking the economy and becoming difficult, and in some cases impossible, to find in bookstores around the country.
This month, the book reached as high as No. 18 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction extended best-seller list. Of course, the sales of “The Red Book” — 13,000, according to Nielsen BookScan — are tiny compared to the millions of copies of Dan Brown’s “Lost Symbol” or Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” that have sold.
But “The Red Book,” originally handwritten in ornate calligraphy and illustrated with intricate tempera paintings, all reproduced in Norton’s 15.4-inch by 11.6-inch red-covered volume, has proven to booksellers that such books can sell, and sell well, even at a premium price.
“We were absolutely amazed,” said Elaine Petrocelli, an owner of Book Passage, an independent company with bookstores in San Francisco and suburban Corte Madera, Calif.
The text is considered the Holy Grail by many Jungians. For decades, Jung’s descendants kept the original, leather-bound volume locked in a bank vault.
It took Sonu Shamdasani, the primary translator, two years to persuade Jung’s family to let him start working on a copy.