Countywide : Paperback Edition of Tower Commission Report Hits Store Shelves, Finds Buyers

You’ve seen it on TV. You’ve read about it in the papers. Now you can have one in your own home!

An overnight sensation--and an overnight publishing feat--the full text of the Tower Commission Report has hit the paperback bookshelves of Orange County, luring readers with the kind of back-cover prose that sells, even at $5.50 a copy:

“It was late November, and the Iran-contra affair had become public. Details and discrepancies filled the headlines.

“The panel’s mandate was clear: investigate the National Security Council . . . Here, after an investigation of more than ten weeks, is their report to the President, with material never before disclosed . . . “

“We got them in yesterday,” said Shelley Houtz, assistant manager of B. Dalton Bookseller at South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, from behind a counter Tuesday. “It took about 20 minutes to get them out. We have it merchandised all over the store.

“We’ve gotten more calls on this book. We’ve got copies on hold, copies in the back, copies up here. The demand has been pretty constant.”

Marilyn Bachman, the store manager, said a man waited an hour for the store to open to buy a copy.

A spokesman for the publisher, Bantam Books in New York, said the paperbacks were popping off the press 47 hours and 29 minutes after the report’s release in Washington. The production time was a record for an “instant book” reprint of a government document, the spokesman said. At a press run of 400,000 copies, it also was the largest initial printing for such a book.

Terri McCullough, manager of the B. Dalton in Fashion Island, had just as much demand--but no books. “Our shipment hasn’t come in. It’s late, and we’ve had lots and lots of calls about it. We could have sold lots. It’s kind of exciting. We’re standing here in the back waiting for it now,” she said.

Deborah Wentzel, manager of Crown Books in Costa Mesa, said her shipment, too, had been delayed. “We’ve been promised 20 copies today, and we’ll probably be sold out by the end of the day,” she said.

Houtz said no one seems to mind paying $5.50 for the 550-page, standard-size paperback. “They just put down their $5.50 and say thank you,” she said. “That’s pretty high for a paperback. Something like this would usually be more like $4.95.”