There’s profit in MYTH

Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has clocked up 250,000 sales in Britain since it came out in paperback two weeks ago.

But The Rule of Four by Americans Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is creating an even more astonishing bestseller in its wake as thousands of readers seek out the arcane Renaissance text which inspired it.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Strife of Love in a Dream) is an allegorical tale published in Venice in 1499, and not available in English until the British arts publishers Thames & Hudson commissioned a translation six years ago.
Now the popularity of The Rule of Four has sparked an unprecedented fascination with a text previously known only to scholars of the Renaissance, and Thames & Hudson is bringing out a paperback edition to meet the expected demand.

Thames & Hudson’s stock of 7,500 copies of the original lavishly designed translation of the Hypnerotomachia sold out, despite a price tag of $70. Smaller hardback editions and a US paperback followed, bringing total sales to nearly 50,000.

British booksellers are predicting a surge of interest here when Hypnerotomachia Poliphili hits the stores on March 21 with promotional stickers proclaiming "The book that inspired The Rule of Four."

"Hypnerotomachia is going to be £12.95, which is quite reasonably priced. A lot of people who bought The Da Vinci Code must have easily spent another £10, 20 or 30 on related books so I’m sure this will sell. Isn’t it marvellous? People are always asking what is going to be the next big thing - obscure Renaissance texts are my next trend!" Thomas Neurath, managing director of Thames & Hudson, is thrilled. He commissioned the translation to mark the company’s 50th birthday because illustrated books, of which this was an early example, are a speciality.

Neurath admits he never believed it would be a hit. "It’s rather gratifying when one sticks one’s neck out and then quite unexpectedly from left field the whole thing suddenly turns into a big success that no one thought it would be," he said. "When we asked Joscelyn Godwin to translate, I thought it would probably take 10 years to sell it and that maybe my descendants would live to see a paperback.

"But I think the public often get underestimated. The Rule of Four appeals to a certain egghead market. I’m not surprised that some of them go from The Rule of Four to read the real thing on which it’s based." Caldwell came across the text while at university in Princeton but struggled with its curious conflation of Latin, Italian and other languages (this was before the translation was made). He decided it was perfect material for the novel he and Thomason, a school friend, had decided to write. Their heroes, Tom and Paul, use the symbols and fantasies of the Hypnerotomachia to unlock a great secret of the past, though Caldwell stresses that their book was written before The Da Vinci Code was published. "In retrospect, writing a novel around a completely unpronounceable book that for a while people thought we had made up was preposterous," he said.

To discover that people actually wanted to read the Hypnerotomachia as well was "strange but wonderful". But he thinks they may find it an odd read.

"There are pictures which lead you to believe there’s an awful lot of sex and violence and that it would be a fantastic Ovidian experience but it’s pages and pages of dimensions of statues and things."

— The Independent

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