Michael Wolff’s headline-grabbing exposé of the US president’s administration has been selling out on both sides of the Atlantic in its first days on sale

Bookshops are scrambling to get their hands on copies of Michael Wolff’s Donald Trump exposé, after a threat of legal action from the US president’s lawyers sent demand for the inside story of a dysfunctional White House soaring.

Originally due out on Tuesday, the US release of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was brought forward to last Friday after extracts were published by the Guardian. Trump’s lawyers subsequently issued a cease-and-desist letter to the US publishers, Henry Holt. The publisher was unbowed, accelerating publication due to what it called the “extraordinary contribution to our national discourse” made by the book.

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Although Holt had printed around 150,000 copies of the book in the US, intended to be held for Tuesday’s release, demand was so high that stores were selling out before the end of the first day on sale. “On Friday, we were able to get more than 540 copies of Wolff’s book but sold out by evening. Over the weekend, we took pre-orders for hundreds more and expect to be able to fill those orders today and tomorrow as additional copies arrive from the publisher,” said Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose, a bookshop in Washington DC. “What’s different with the Wolff book is how unexpected the surge in interest is. Even the publisher appears surprised by how strong the demand has been.”

Henry Holt has now received orders for more than 1m copies of Fire and Fury, according to the New York Times, with “hundreds of thousands” of ebooks already sold, and sales of the audiobook “in the low six figures”. Amazon in the US and the UK is out of stock of the hardback, offering shipping times of two to four weeks in the US and three to five days in the UK, while Waterstones sold out at the weekend. Its Piccadilly, London store received a delivery of 500 copies on Tuesday – which it expected to sell fast.

“Demand is very high, both in our shops and on our website, and Fire and Fury looks set to be the biggest political book of the year,” said spokeswoman Sandra Taylor. “Its UK publisher, Little, Brown, is continuing to do a fantastic job keeping up with a title which is quite unprecedented. We had early deliveries to a selection of shops over the weekend and all of these copies sold out extremely quickly.”

John Sargent, chief executive of Henry Holt’s parent company Macmillan, told the New York Times that Trump’s response to Fire and Fury “has undeniably increased the sales of the book and increased the reach of the book”. He told the Washington Post: “We have multiple printings at multiple printers now and all of our suppliers are doing a remarkable job of getting books into the marketplace. They all realise the importance of this book as a commercial success, but they also recognise the huge importance of reading a book the government is trying to stop.”

Sargent wrote to Macmillan staff on Monday, describing the “clear effort by the president of the US to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government” as “flagrantly unconstitutional”.

Trump’s response to a book that casts aspersions on his mental health and intellect was to tweet over the weekend that “actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart”. He added: “I went from VERY successful businessman, to top TV Star … to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!” He described Fire and Fury as “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist”.

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On Monday, Henry Holt’s lawyers responded to Trump’s lawyers’ demands, saying that “my clients do not intend to cease publication, no such retraction will occur, and no apology is warranted”.

“Though your letter provides a basic summary of New York libel law, tellingly, it stops short of identifying a single statement in the book that is factually false or defamatory. Instead, the letter appears to be designed to silence legitimate criticism. This is the antithesis of an actionable libel claim,” says the letter. “We have no reason to doubt – and your letter provides no reason to change this conclusion – that Mr Wolff’s book is an accurate report on events of vital public importance. Mr Trump is the president of the US, with the ‘bully pulpit’ at his disposal. To the extent he disputes any statement in the book, he has the largest platform in the world to challenge it.”