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E-mail message pushes up 'Mr. Pine' sales
By Dan Piller
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. July 20, 2001.
Business section, page 2.
Thirty-six years after first being published, Mr. Pine and his Purple House are hot again.
The childrens' book about diversity and individualism, republished last year by Keller publisher Jill Morgan, got a literary boost this week when Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos sent out an e-mail to customers advising them that the old favorite could be had again. Before Bezos' e-mail, about 3,000 copies of the revived Mr. Pine had been sold.
The surge in sales pushed Mr. Pine's Purple House to No. 15 on the bestseller list of Amazon, the national Internet retailer. On Thursday, it had cooled slightly to No. 23. The book sells for $17.95.
"I've had several hundred orders since the e-mail," said Morgan, who founded her home-based publishing company last year specifically to reintroduce Mr. Pine to a new generation. The book was a favorite of Morgan's when she was growing up in Cincinnati.
Appropriately, Morgan's publishing company is called Purple House Press. It has five other childrens' titles and expects to add six more within a year.
Morgan and her husband moved to Texas from Florida in 1994, both for jobs at Motorola. She quit to spend more time with their three children. While at home she began selling out-of-print childrens' books on the Internet.
"I discovered that Mr. Pine was sellings for $300," she said. "Obviously there was a market for it."
So Morgan bought the publishing rights from the author, Leonard Kessler of Sarasota, Fla. The books were printed in Malaysia.
"We'll order another printing of Mr. Pine for the Christmas sales period," Morgan said. "The book was already pretty big, but it got bigger this week."
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