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A new book about the late Pope John Paul II has been snapped up so fast by readers in his native Poland that bookshops ran out of all 250,000 copies within hours, its publisher said on Tuesday.
"The book is selling extremely well. We have started a second print run which will be on the shop shelves soon," Pawel Rydz, head of the TBA publishing house, told AFP.
Rydz declined to say how many copies the publishers eventually expected to sell, but the potential market in Poland is huge.
Some 95 percent of the Polish population of just over 38 million professes to be Roman Catholic, and for many Poles John Paul II was a source of national pride as well as a religious figure who earned love and respect.
The memoir, by the pontiff's personal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz, was first published in Italy last week under the title "A Life with Karol."
The Polish edition, entitled "Testimony," went on sale here on Monday.
John Paul II -- born Karol Wojtyla in the south of Poland in 1920 -- was elected pontiff in 1978. He died in April 2005.
Dziwisz was his secretary for nearly 40 years and is now the archbishop of Krakow in southern Poland, a post which was held by John Paul II before he became pontiff.
The royalties from the book will help finance the construction of the John Paul II centre in Krakow, which will house archives about his life and provide teaching based on the pontiff's thinking, Dziwisz's spokesman Father Robert Necek told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.
The memoir is made up of an interview with Dziwisz by the Vatican-watcher and Catholic writer Gian Franco Svidercoschi, and retraces the life of John Paul II over 230 pages.
The revelations it includes range from how the increasingly-frail pontiff almost stepped down in 2000, to how he would give his guards the slip in the 1980s and go skiing incognito.
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