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The Associated Press
Sioux Falls, S.D.

More copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder memoir being printed

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'Pioneer Girl'
'Pioneer Girl' edited by Pamela Smith Hill
Book cover courtesy of publisher

South Dakota's state-owned publishing house is printing more copies of the best-selling memoir by prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder.

"Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography," edited by Pamela Smith Hill, was released in November.

It has proved to be a blockbuster for the South Dakota Historical Society Press. It's in its fourth week on the New York Times Best Sellers list and as of early May will have 125,000 copies in print.

"We were anticipating we would print 5,000," Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, told the Argus Leader newspaper.

Wilder penned the popular children's series of "Little House on the Prairie" books, but her autobiography was written for an adult audience and gives a more realistic, grittier view of frontier living.

"We knew we had a perennially popular author, Laura Ingalls Wilder," Koupal said. "We had a book that we had worked very hard to make sure it was readable and accessible — not one academic talking to another. We knew we had a readable book and a popular author, but we didn't think best-seller."

Books from fourth and fifth printing runs will be shipped to distributors, online booksellers and bookstores by early May, according to Jeff Mammenga, media coordinator for the State Historical Society. A sixth print run likely will come in late summer or early fall in preparation for Christmas.

"But who knows?" Koupal said. "Every time I guess on this it just goes crazy. I have no idea what will really happen. It has been amazing."