Watership Down: Rolling Back the 1960s

Abstract

Watership Down has been one of the publishing triumphs of the 1970s. In his review of that decade, Christopher Booker notes that, ‘its total sales to date, in the Puffin and Penguin editions alone, are around three million — and its world-wide sales are several times that’.¹ On the cover of the 1976 edition of the Penguin paperback it is described as a ‘world number one bestseller’, and though such claims are notoriously hard to substantiate, it is evident that Watership Down has sold exceptionally well both at home and abroad. When Macmillan of New York paid $800,000 for the American publishing rights, this incorporated ‘the largest sum of money ever paid for paperback rights’,² and the revenue from both book and film has allowed the author to retire from the Civil Service and to pay for the construction of an impressive residence on the Isle of Man.