Medieval Marketing

Years ago, I singled out Barbara Tuchman's 1978 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century as a really bad book. This study of the Middle Ages as a distant mirror of our own times is weird and warped and entirely without sympathy for its subject. At first, I thought its wild popularity had touched a nerve with the reading public. Then I found out how its publisher flooded the preview/review market with so many free copies that the book was bound to get lots of coverage in those pre-web days. It wasn't just that the book was bad; it was that its "new marketing strategy" was corrosive. So much for the "free market."

But is anything as bad as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003)? This formulaic knock-off of fascistic conspiracy theories is a trite study for a film script—and no wonder the movie was also bad. I love the chapters that are only a couple of lines long. Again, it is a book whose publishers flooded the preview/review market with thousands of free copies. Yet for many of my students, it is the book that brought them into the English major. For others, it is the only book they've ever enjoyed reading. IS it possible that even a Bad Book can do Good?