Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ Sells Big

Sales figures won’t be available for several days, but coverage of The Lost Symbol seems to be in agreement on two things: It’s the number-one seller on all sites, and it’s the biggest first-day adult fiction seller anyone can recall — which, if you read between the lines, means that it didn’t sell as many first-day copies as the last Harry Potter book.

From the title, one could tell that this was likely to be another Robert Langdon book; the only questions were which conspiracy would be probed, and where said probing would take place. The answers: Freemasonry, and Washington, D.C. Brown may be running out of plot devices; the Masons haven’t been a hot-button topic since William Henry Harrison ran on the Anti-Masonic Party ticket in 1836, and it’s been decades since the last good Masonic conspiracy theory. However, the domestic locations may make the inevitable movie shoot easier to arrange than the first two Langdon movies.

Given that “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” have so far raked in a combined worldwide gross of over $1.2 billion for Columbia, expect a deal announcement soon.