White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway‘s suggestion on last Sunday’s Meet the Press that the Trump Administration was offering “alternative facts” in its estimations of crowd sizes at last week’s inauguration rattled the minds of Americans who believe in cold, hard truth. Conway’s embrace of state-sponsored misinformation was so unnerving that it caused George Orwell’s 1984 to leap to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list.
Demand for Orwell’s dystopian classic has climbed so high, in fact, that the digital retailer is out of copies of both paperback and hardcover editions of the book, which is currently printed by Signet Classics.
Same goes for the DC Public Library’s supply. Of the library system’s 38 copies of the Signet version, 34 are already checked out, and there are at least ten holds on the remaining four. Additionally, the library’s entire cache of e-book licenses are in use. Both Spanish-language copies are checked out, with another 22 holds on them. If you’re a DC Library member and you need your Orwell fix, there’s unlimited access to the audio version read by Simon Prebble, and two copies of the 1984 film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton are still available to be checked out. But the library says it is getting more copies of the book.
More copies of "1984" are on the way to @dcpl, but while you wait, you may want to listen to the audiobook version: https://t.co/DOxeEoOPX8
— DC Public Library (@dcpl) January 26, 2017
You can search the DC Public Libary’s catalog here. If it’s still out of copies of 1984, wait two minutes and try again.
Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.
