The pub date for Dan Brown’s next book, Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; RH Large Print; Vintage Espanol; RH Audio) is May 14. It turns out that is no accident. RH/Doubleday’s Suzanne Herz tells the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog, that if you write the date backwards, it become 3.1415, which is the value of pi.

She  leaves it up to fans to try to piece together why that would be important to the plot, which the publisher describes this way,

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces…Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust…before the world is irrevocably altered.

The Inferno is the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which was just released in a  new translation by Clive James (Norton).

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