Holds are heavy on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Blackstone Audio; Thorndike) and are likely to continue to rise. It jumped to #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings soon after Christmas, indicating that this was the gift people were disappointed not to find under the tree and that it will continue to sell in to the new year.

New York’s Frick Museum has been an unexpected beneficiary of the interest. It is host of a traveling exhibit from the Mauritshuis museum, which features the painting of the book’s title, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. The book was published just as the show opened, causing attendance to spike. The marquee piece of the show, Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, is now vying for attention with the lesser-known, tiny Goldfinch (one weird reflection of its popularity; the museum shop added a Goldfinch tote bag to the one featuring The Girl).

The painting has a power of it’s own, as Malcolm Jones attests in an appreciation of it in the Book Beast and was even featured in the Wall Street Journal back in 2010.

If you are planning a visit, take a look at 5 Things You Should Know About The Frick. The Mauritshuis exhibit runs through January 19.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 6th, 2014 at 10:10 am and is filed under 2013 -- Fall, Bestsellers, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.