Homer’s The Odyssey is flying off the shelves in Dunedin in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s film adaption, with one bookseller saying copies are going within days of being advertised. Hard To Find Books Dunedin assistant manager Eric Beeson said they had observed a spike in demand for The Odyssey — “big time”. Copies were selling quickly online. “With some of these, within a day or two,” Mr Beeson said. “If I’m putting stuff up online, it’s going right out the door. “I’ve listed at least a dozen, let’s say, copies of The Odyssey or kind of Homeric-type titles in the past couple of weeks, and they’re gone.” Whenever the bookstore had a big run on orders for a particular title or author, it was usually because someone died, something had been adapted, or someone was interviewed on national radio. “In this case, it’s definitely the adaptation.” The Odyssey is an epic poem about Odysseus’ encounters with natural and divine forces during his 10-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. It is traditionally thought to have been composed by a single poet, Homer, of whom nothing is known about his life, in 8th or 7th Century-BC Greece. British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s adaptation was released in New Zealand cinemas last month and has already grossed more than $900 million worldwide. Mr Beeson said there was a large amount of online discourse and chatter about the film. There was also a big interest in anything related to ancient Greece, be that art, culture or the classical world in general. “Popular reinterpretations of ancient Greek myths are kind of hitting their fever pitch. “The kids who are in university right now, they would have been the ones who were reading the Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson books about a decade ago. “They’re all of age now and I think are familiar enough with the source material that they’re getting pretty hyped on it.” Dunedin was also an exceptional situation. Due to cuts and reorganisations across tertiary education institutes nationwide, interest in the classics was better represented in Dunedin than perhaps elsewhere in the country, Mr Beeson said. “The concentration of classics students in the country are now in Dunedin. “We’ve definitely, definitely seen our business change in that over the past couple of years, just more young people requesting classics in here.” A Dunedin City Council spokesman said while they had not seen a big spike in demand for The Odyssey, there was “ongoing interest” among its Dunedin Public Libraries users in Greek myths more generally. Several of its eight adult copies were available to borrow on Thursday and others were on loan with a small reserve list. Just over half of those were placed after the film’s release. An eAudiobook of Stephen Fry’s Odyssey had two copies, both of which were on loan with 14 holds placed, the spokesman said. tim.scott@odt.co.nz
