Dreamy Sales of Jung Book Stir Analysis

SURE, Dan Brown and Sarah Palin are topping the best-seller charts, but the breakout of the holiday book-buying season just may have been an elaborate, richly illustrated tome that records the dreams and spiritual questing of an author who has been dead for nearly half a century. The list price for this 9-pound, 416-page volume? $195.

As online and big-box retailers hustle to outdo themselves in discounts, “The Red Book” by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, has surprised booksellers and its publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, by bucking the economy and becoming difficult, and in some cases impossible, to find in bookstores around the country. On Amazon.com, the book — which is not available in a Kindle e-book edition — “usually ships . . . . (read more here)