Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, and the books and magazines commemorating the event have turned into a booming subcategory.
“It doesn’t seem like 50 years,” said Richard Stolley, a senior adviser to Time Inc. who in 1963 was instrumental in procuring the Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination for Life magazine.
“Not a year went by that I was not reminded about the Zapruder film in some form. Every time I see the film, my heart still leaps at the head shot,” said Stolley, who, ironically, on Thursday was making a stopover in Dallas where Kennedy was assassinated.
Time Inc., under the Life label, has produced 100,000 copies of a new book, “The Day Kennedy Died.” The $50 book contains a removable reprint of the original Life that contained the first black-and-white stills of the Zapruder film.
“We expect it to sell out,” said a Time Inc. spokesman.
As the former LA bureau chief for Life magazine, Stolley, who had flown to Dallas as soon as he heard the news, got a tip from a Dallas stringer that a local businessman had a film of the assassination. The stringer caught the last name Zapruder but little else.
Stolley thumbed through the Z’s in the phone book until he found Zapruder. “I finally reached him around 11 p.m.,” he said.
Zapruder instructed Stolley to meet him at his office at 9 a.m. the next morning, a Saturday.
Life agreed to pay $50,000 to Zapruder for the rights to the print version on the spot. Three days later, Zapruder agreed to sell all the rights, including the film, for another $100,000 to Life, putting the final price tag at $150,000.
In 1976, it was sold back to the Zapruder family for $1. The family later sold it for $16 million to the federal government, which has the original, while the copyright passed to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, the site of the Texas Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots.
The biggest JFK blockbuster of recent vintage is Bill O’Reilly’s and Martin Dugard’s “Killing Kennedy,” which is still holding fast at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list 60 weeks after publication. Publisher Henry Holt said the book has sold 2.5 million in all formats.
“He was the most glamorous president in history, and his image is frozen in time because he was killed so young,” said O’Reilly, who was a freshman at Chaminade High School when he heard the news over the school loudspeaker.
Skyhorse Publishing has churned out at least eight books, with press runs in the tens of thousands a piece, outlining a variety of conspiracy theories.
“I think there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK, and the truth can be found in these books in some combination of the theories present in each of them,” said Tony Lyons, publisher of SkyHorse.
His two biggest sellers are Roger Stone’s “The Man Who Killed Kennedy” and “They Killed Our President,” penned by former wrestler and US Senator, Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
Simon & Schuster recently released former Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s book with Lisa McCubbin, “Five Days in November.”
The magazine industry is also expected to reap a JFK windfall.
“There will be millions of dollars in extra newsstand revenue generated from the JFK 50th Anniversary specials being released,” said Joshua Gary, vice president of systems at MagNet, which tracks newsstand sales.
Two notable releases are the Vanity Fair Special from Condé Nast for $11.99 and special $9.99 issue of TV Guide.
Everyone from the National Enquirer to Atlantic Monthly and last week’s double issue of Time have had JFK covers.
The Saturday Evening Post, which battled Life in the bygone era, has reissued its original issue covering the Kennedy assassination.
“We printed about 10,000 copies,” said Joan SerVaas, president of the Saturday Evening Post Publishing Co. Its oversized format and the presence of long since-banned tobacco ads kept the magazine off newsstands, but readers can buy it off the website for $11.99.