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The ABC dramatization spurred a rush for the 688-page book, which has gone into 14 printings since it was published in October. Sales hit a one-day peak of 67,000 on the third day of the TV series; so far, about 750,000 copies have been sold (list price: $12.50). To keep up with the soaring demand, Doubleday, the publisher, will have 1 million copies in print by March 1. In many cities, it became common for copies of Roots to be stolen from stores. In New York City, thieves broke a display window in a Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue and stole all the copies of Roots. Peddlers are hawking stolen copies for $5 and up in New York and on Washington's buses, subways and street corners.
At a suburban Los Angeles department store one day last week, some 3,000 people lined up with copies for Haley to autograph. To his astonishment, he said, he "encountered only five persons who didn't have more than one copy of the book. Some came with as many as eight. One woman gave me two copies and said the second was for the baby in her stomach."
So far, Haley has made well over $1 million in royalties, and the money seems bound to flow in even faster. To promote the book, he is making a three-month lecture tour. In addition, a two-record album telling of his hunt for roots will soon be on the market; a more detailed version will be forthcoming as a book, titled Search. Finally, he says, there are plans for further TV series, perhaps concentrating on young Kunta Kinte in Africa or his descendants' story just after the Civil War.
According to Haley, Roots is used in courses at 276 colleges and universities, and many high schools are also setting up courses around the book. In addition, publishers in 13 countries have bought translation rights. Thus, with a paperback edition scheduled in the U.S. in October.* Roots is well on the way to becoming one of the bestselling books in years, though it has far to go to catch up with Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which has sold 21 million copies, in hardback and paperback, since 1936.
It was the TV dramatization that set off this vast craving for the book and that reached so deeply into Americans' minds. Part of its success may have come from the use of familiar techniques of TV melodrama—with a twist: the heroes and heroines were black. Said black Historian Benjamin Quarles of Morgan State College in Maryland: "There was the threat of violence, the appeal of sex, all building up to a wonderful climax—all the things that make for good television."
Whatever the reason for the TV version's popularity, it did not necessarily have much to do with artistic merit. Leading TV critics had, at best, serious reservations about the series, and many panned it outright. The Chicago Sun-Times' William Granger, complaining of "puerile" writing and "caricatures," described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions."