Sleepers

A sleeper is a nice little book that takes off slowly, without benefit of splashy advertising, book-club promotion or a flood of rave reviews, but that ends up on the best-seller list the old-fashioned way--because readers fall in love with it and tell their friends.

So it has been with Robert James Waller’s slender novel “The Bridges of Madison County,” a tastefully erotic and quite moving love story about a magazine photographer named Robert Kincaid from Bellingham, Washington, and a farm wife named Francesca Johnson he meets while he is photographing covered bridges in Madison County, Iowa, where she lives.

The publisher, Warner Books, had reasonable hopes for the book when they released it last April. They printed 29,000 copies of the first edition--roughly three times the size of the usual print run for a first novel by an unknown author. At $14.95 it was a bargain among current hardcovers.

The book was an underground phenomenon for its first three or four months in the stores. But in August it suddenly showed up on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and has now been on the list for 21 weeks. After 18 printings, according to Warner, it has sold 229,500 copies, a remarkable figure for any novel.

What happened to “Bridges,” both the publisher and the author feel, is the booksellers themselves discovered the book first. (Independent-bookstore owners love their work, which is probably their first and last line of defense against the encroachments of the discounting chains.) One store, Kingsley’s on St. Armand’s Circle near Sarasota, Fla., offered “Bridges” with an unheard-of money-back guarantee. To date, Kingsley’s alone has sold 1,600 copies; and so far only two readers have demanded their money back. The book has been pushed hard by other stores as far spread as Shreveport, La., Montpelier, Vt., and Santa Barbara. It has been optioned for the movies by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions.

Waller has been teaching management decision-making (an amalgam of math and economics) at Northern Iowa State University at Cedar Falls for many years. But he is also a songwriter, an entertainer (guitar and five-string banjo) and an essayist, with a collection of pieces, including several about canoeing on Iowa’s rivers (“Beyond the Firelight,” from Iowa State University Press). Waller, like Kincaid in the book, is also a serious photographer.

Traveling in his own pickup truck, Waller had, like his character, been photographing covered bridges in Iowa. On the drive home he could not get out of mind a lyric from a bossa nova song he had written years before: “I know you had your own dreams, too, Francesca.”

“I had this strong sense that there was a story, some kind of story, that needed to be written,” Waller said in a telephone interview recently. When he got back to Cedar Falls, he went to his computer and wrote the novel in 14 days. With the sleeper success of “Bridges,” Waller has taken a permanent leave of absence from the university. He has finished two more novels, the first of which, as yet untitled, will be published in the autumn of 1993.