THE US: Several bookstores in the United States are planning to open their doors at midnight tomorrow for the first sales of one of the most hyped books in publishing history, Mrs Hillary Clinton's memoir, Living History.
Publisher Simon & Schuster is printing 1 million copies of the book, the largest yet for a contemporary work of non-fiction, and shipping them across the United States under tight security over the weekend.
Extracts of the book detailing Mrs Clinton's distress over the Monica Lewinsky affair have been leaked to the Associated Press, creating considerable advance publicity.
The New York senator will begin a summer-long promotion with a Monday lunchtime signing session at Barnes & Noble's store on Manhattan's Fifth Ave. Mrs Clinton will then embark on a book-signing tour which will take her across the United States.
The promotional trips would be the perfect launch for a presidential campaign for 2004, but this has - up to now - been ruled out by the former First Lady.
Nevertheless, in a new poll published yesterday by Fox News, Mrs Clinton scored a 70 per cent approval rating among Democratic voters, against 55 per cent for the nearest declared Democratic candidate, Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Mr Lieberman was Mr Al Gore's running mate in the last presidential election.
No other potential challengers to President Bush has significant name recognition.
The poll found that if former President Bill Clinton was pitted against President Bush in a hypothetical contest next year, Mr Bush would win by 53 per cent to 32 per cent.
A CNN/USA Today poll last week found that Americans were split evenly on the former First Lady: 43 per cent held a favourable opinion of her and 43 per cent unfavourable.
In Washington, Olsson's bookstore will reopen at 11.45 p.m. tomorrow to cater for political junkies who cannot wait until Monday morning to check the index for names.
Ms Joan Ripley, owner of the only bookstore in Mrs Clinton's home town of Chappaqua, New York, had ordered 1,000 copies for her Second Story Book Shop in advance of a June 14th book-signing session.
The book, for which Mrs Clinton is said to have received $8 million, will be formally launched on June 17th at a party in Washington DC to which all her 99 Senate colleagues have been invited.
The book tour will take Mrs Clinton to Europe later in the summer, but it is not certain whether she will made a trip to Ireland, which she says in Living History is the foreign country she most liked to visit while at the White House.
The book is already a best seller on the virtual book store, amazon.com, where it ranks second to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling, due out June 21st.
Apart from the intern episode, Mrs Clinton recounts the six "brutal" months after inauguration day in 1993, during which her father died, her friend Vincent Foster killed himself, her mother- in-law was dying and the new administration was making mistakes.
"I did what I often do when faced with adversity," she says. "I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding."