Until this year I’ve never been a Black Friday person, and I’ve also never said things like “I'm going with the pink and blue Lover bodysuit tonight.” But I do say things like that now, and I did show up at Target before dawn on Black Friday this year. Swifties in the family can do strange things to a guy.
December 8th marked the last night of Taylor Swift’s two-year, 19-country, 149-city Eras Tour, and a lot of people will miss a lot of things about it. What I'll miss most is playing a game called Mastermind on the Swift Alert app with my wife and daughter. For the uninitiated, this game involves picking Taylor’s outfits, instruments, and songs for each night’s show, and is pretty much a pop music version of fantasy football. I’m proud of my personal best score of 76 on Toronto night three, but real Swifties usually mop the floor with me.
Their connection to the tour is orders of magnitude deeper than my own, so the new Eras Tour Book, which preserves the glory of it all in 256 glossy, photo-filled pages, is here just in time. It was this coveted object I sought when I crawled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. the morning after Thanksgiving, and I’m proud to say you can now check it out from the Lawrence Public Library.
How’s that for the dedication of a public servant? Truth be told, I'm of a certain age known for waking up way too early anyway, and I was there to get a Christmas present for the special Swiftie in my own life. But I did grab an extra copy for the library (for which I was reimbursed). And I must say my first experience as a Black Friday shopper in pursuit of the season's hottest gift was not what I expected. The doors opened at 6 a.m. to a small, orderly crowd, and those of us who were there for Taylor Swift stuff (an exclusive CD and vinyl also made their debuts that morning) were politely corralled into a quickly moving line. I was back in my car by 6:30, and I hadn’t been shivved, shoved, or so much as cursed at (in fact I even exchanged nods of solidarity with a few fellow Swiftie-adjacents who looked like they also would have been up this early anyway).
Obviously this is not the usual process for acquiring a new book for the library, but Taylor Swift has taken on book publishing in the same transformative way she has approached music sales and world tours. Instead of working with a traditional publisher, she published the book herself, and a recent Publisher’s Weekly story reports that although the book is only available at Target, over 800,000 of the 2,000,000 copies printed have already sold. To put these numbers into perspective, look at the initial print runs of some of this fall’s other biggest books, such as John Grisham’s Framed (1.5 million), Michael Connelly’s The Waiting (750,000), Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment (600,000) and Connie Chung’s Connie (250,000). Hot Mess, the latest in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, has sold 493,000 copies since its release on October 22nd.
It’s a peak time for Swifterature, generally, with a Little Golden Book biography topping bestseller lists since last year, and a new biography for adults, Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak Is the National Anthem soaring up the lists since its release in November. These and other titles on the following list are sure to hold interest for Swifties of all ages, or anyone just be wanting to learn more.
Heartbreak Is the National Anthem
STARS AROUND MY SCARS: THE ANNOTATED POETRY OF TAYLOR SWIFT
Unofficial Taylor Swift Crochet
LONG LIVE: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THE FOLKLORE AND FANDOM OF TAYLOR SWIFT
TAYLOR SWIFT BY THE BOOK: THE LITERATURE BEHIND THE LYRICS, FROM FAIRY TALES TO TORTURED POETS
INVISIBLE STRINGS: 113 POETS RESPOND TO THE SONGS OF TAYLOR SWIFT
TAYLOR SWIFT'S THE ERAS TOUR ENCYCLOPEDIA
-Dan Coleman is a Senior Collection Development Librarian at Lawrence Public Library.
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