US: Crowds of fans slept overnight on city sidewalks for the chance to greet former president Bill Clinton yesterday at his first appearance to sign copies of his freshly released memoirs.
The line of some 1,000 buyers, who spent hours camping out with blankets and coolers, snaked several blocks around the midtown bookstore where Mr Clinton was greeting the public in a promotional tour for My Life. One couple lay locked in a sleeping embrace. The mood grew less festive as rain began to fall, but those in line said it was worth the opportunity of meeting the former president.
"I'm smitten with him," said Ms Lisa Borinsky, a furniture maker from New Jersey who arrived on Monday evening to start waiting in line. "The only true aphrodisiac in this world is power, and the man exudes power, which makes him unbelievably attractive."
Mr Clinton's 957-page tome went on sale just after midnight, and several bookstores in Washington and New York remained open to accommodate early-bird customers. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf received a massive two million advance orders for the book, which had a first run printing of 1.5 million copies.
Mr Clinton reportedly got a $10 million advance. He planned to hold two book signings - one at Barnes & Noble in midtown Manhattan and another at the Hue-Man bookstore uptown in Harlem - and appear in a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The book spans his life from an abuse-scarred childhood in Arkansas to the tumultuous White House years tainted by his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Many on line at Barnes & Noble said they had never bought a presidential memoir but by the time they had secured a copy, they were too bleary-eyed to open it.
The former president marked the launch on Monday with a celebrity-studded book party for 1,00 invited guests at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.