Book publishers see surging interest in the US Constitution and print new editions

Boston Globe

23-04-2025

The Random House volumes, released through its Modern Library imprint, will join a prolific market that has surged in recent months. According to Circana, which tracks around 85 percent of the print retail market, editions of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the US Constitution are selling at their fastest pace since Circana began compiling numbers in 2004.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Around 162,000 combined copies have sold through mid-April, compared to 58,000 during the same period the year before and around 33,000 in 2023. Sales were around 92,000 in the early months of Trump's first term, in 2017, more than double the pace of 2016.
Advertisement
Brenna Connor, a book industry analyst for Circana, said the jump 'is likely in response to the recent change of administration' and cited increased interest in other books about democracy and government, among them
Advertisement
'This pursual of political understanding is playing out in a few different areas,' Connor added.
Meacham, during a recent phone interview with the Associated Press, said that the founders had sought to make sense of a revolutionary era — whether breaking with England or debating how to form a federal government with enough power to rule effectively, without giving it the kind of monarchical authority that enraged the colonies.
Reading the Declaration and other texts, he believes, can give today's public a similar sense of mission and guiding principles.
'It is a tumultuous moment … to put it kindly,' Meacham said. 'One way to address the chaos of the present time, what Saint Paul would call the 'tribulations' of the present time, is to re-engage with the essential texts that are about creating a system that is still worth defending.'
The Modern Library books will have many competitors. The 18th-century documents all are in the public domain, can be read for free online, and anyone can publish them. According to Circana, popular editions have been released by Skyhorse, Penguin, Barnes & Noble, and others.
'We generally see increased sales of editions of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution every election cycle, but particularly this year,' said Shannon DeVito, Barnes & Noble's senior director of book strategy. 'This could be because next year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,' she said, 'or the fast and furious current political conversations and policy changes.'