Booksellers’ ‘delight’ in new Dan Brown novel

Booksellers are predicting Dan Brown’s next Robert Langdon thriller will be a public-pleasing bestseller and will compete with the latest “megasellers” from E L James, Harper Lee and J K Rowling in terms of sales figures.

Brown’s new novel, Origin, announced yesterday (28th September), will be published in the UK under Transworld imprint Bantam Press on 26th September 2017, priced £20. Brown’s UK publisher Bill Scott-Kerr heralded it “another extraordinary event [for the publishing world] to look forward to next year”.

The Bookseller, 28 September 2016

We had the intimate conviction that two and only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. The very worst, securing immediate attention by way of some trick, gradually fade from the public memories; the very best, being solid and shipshape productions … remain.

Ford Madox Ford 1924 Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818 Ozymandias

Geoffrey K Pullum analysed The Da Vinci Code for Language Log here in 2008. It’s quite entertaining.