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What Really Caused a ‘Surge’ in Sales of Orwell’s Book?

The BFD. A copy of George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ is displayed at The Last Bookstore on January 25, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. George Orwell’s 68 year-old dystopian novel ‘1984’ has surged to the top of Amazon.com’s best seller list and its publisher Penguin has put in an order for 75,000 reprints. (Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Enjoying contributor Christie’s piece from the other day ‘Alison Mau: A Comedy of Errors’ I chose to ignore said author’s advice and read the original article on Stuff that spurred the clever response. Christie is right: Mau’s piece is indeed a comedy of errors.

The BFD. Stuff up of the day.

“Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 sold out”. Really? Perhaps Stuff means ‘Copies’?

The caption goes on to mention that the central character of ‘1984’ (actually: ‘Nineteen Eighty-four. A novel’ but let’s not be pedantic) was responsible for ‘altering historical archives‘: dear, oh dear. That can’t be good. Mau would never do that, would she? Stuff would never do that, would they? Make stuff up? Change facts? Yes, they would, and often.

Claiming that the book ‘sold out’ after Kelly-Anne Conway’s comment is simply untrue. It’s a fib, it never sold out anywhere. There was a ‘surge’ in sales of Orwell’s book which anti-Trump journos chose to attribute to Conway’s comment, but only by completely ignoring the fact that hours earlier that very same day, hugely influential (to hard-core lefties) ‘Huffington Post’ published this feature pushing the Orwell slant:

The BFD.

So: what was actually responsible for the book’s sales surge? HuffPo’s 2,000+word essay or Conway’s two-word remark? You be the judge.

Ali Mau #faketoo?

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