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Divine luck for
McGill-Queen’s
May 18, 2007: The
big event in international publishing this week is the release of Jesus of Nazareth, a study of the life and
teachings of Jesus by Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. The originating
publisher, Doubleday U.S., is expected to do blockbuster
business with it, but at least one Canadian house – McGill-Queen’s University
Press – is likely to see some benefits as well.
In the lead-up to the
book’s release, a number of media outlets – most notably Time magazine – have run articles on a New
York rabbi named Jacob Neusner, who is reportedly quoted in Jesus of Nazareth more often than any
other author, save the gospel writers and the apostle Paul. Specifically,
Ratzinger quotes Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks
with Jesus, a work he once described as “by far the most important
book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade.” Though the book was
originally published by Random House U.S. in 1993, it is now published
exclusively by McGill-Queen’s, and no one is more excited about that than
McGill-Queen’s executive director Philip Cercone.
According to Cercone,
the first and most tangible benefit is simply that every publisher of Jesus of Nazareth will have to fork over
excerpt royalties. “[Doubleday] wanted the rights for free, and I said, wait a
minute, not even water’s free these days,” he explains. “And it wasn’t a small
fee, either, because it was based on their print run, which is in the hundreds
of thousands.”
But the second and possibly more lucrative benefit is, of
course, that sales of the Neusner book are expected to increase enormously.
Before all the hubbub began, McGill-Queen’s had actually let the book go out of
print, but once word came of the Time article, they put a new cover on it
and rushed it back in. “We’re hoping to sell it as a companion volume to
[Jesus of Nazareth],” says
Cercone. Though Cercone wouldn’t say how large the print run is, he would say
that it is “by far the largest print run we did this fiscal
year.”
McGill-Queen’s came into possession of the rights in 2000, after
Random House U.S. let them lapse. “We did another
book with Neusner in 1999 – The Theology of
the Oral Torah – and it was then that he asked us if we’d be
interested in picking up A Rabbi Talks with
Jesus. We jumped on it, and it did very well for us in
Canada and the
United
States,” says Cercone. “I think Random House
realizes that they let it go too soon. They’re kicking themselves
now.”
In the wake of all the Pope-related attention, McGill-Queen’s has
sold rights to Neusner’s book in Italy, Spain, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and Sweden, with
more rights sales expected in the future.
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