AT LAST!

We’ve now emerged from the long winter of waiting for Dan Brown’s next book. Who’d have thunk it would be FIVE YEARS?

A lot has changed, including the announced title, which will be “The Lost Symbol,” to be released worldwide on September 15, 2009.

Not only has the publisher, Doubleday, now released very good images of the covers for the book in United States and United Kingdom versions, but it’s clear that the e-book version will go on sale at the same instant, and there will be large print and audio versions.

AND, the publishers have begun a full-court press to generate buzz by supplying “clues” about the book. So far, the major clues have been released via Twitter, Facebook and the Amazon.com page for The Lost Symbol (TLS). (This just in, also at gather.com.)

The clues business has been going on for a couple of months already, and there are well over 100 clues now, with more coming in at the rate of two or three per day. Some weeks ago, I had expressed the suspicion that Dan Brown’s publishing team is really just running us around the pea patch for exercise, rather than pointing to specific things that will be in TLS. It looks as though almost anything plausible in history, in any part of the world and in many different cultures or languages, is fair game.

With such a hodge-podge of clues, it is a good idea to drop back to a bit of a distance and try to discern the major themes that Dan Brown may deal with in TLS. That’s what I will aim to do in the next two or three weeks as we eagerly anticipate the book.