The Year of Aphrodite: Book Launch Plus 365

One year ago, Chasing Aphrodite hit bookstores. The amazing success we’ve enjoyed over the past twelve months is humbling, and we thought it a good opportunity to thank you, our most dedicated fans. Thank you for everything you’ve done to help spread the word.

Here are some highlights from the past year:

We’ve written magazine cover-stories and excerpts; newspaper Op-Eds and several articles; and nearly 100 muckraking blog posts, including several exclusive scoops.

We’ve fired off 2,000 tweets with the latest looting news; and fed our 300 Facebook friends with a steady stream of news and updates about museums and the illicit antiquities trade.

We’ve revealed suspect art at the Met, the Getty, the Seattle Art Museum, the Cleveland, Dumbarton Oaks, The Norton Simon, Tampa, Toledo, Dallas, Kimbell, LACMA, the Walters, Boston MFA, San Antonio Museum, Indiana University, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, RISD, Sotheby’s and elsewhere.

We’ve received rave reviews from readers and critics (a few sour ones too) and have been interviewed by an alphabet soup of outlets: NPR, PBS, VOA, KPCC, KCRW, KQED, KPFK, etc.

We’ve (briefly) made the bestseller list, and sold more copies that the publisher (and authors) expected — we’re currently in the third printing. Chasing Aphrodite has been honored with the SAFE Beacon Award, the ARCA Prize for Art Crime Scholarship and, most recently, the California Book Award.

The authors in front of the goddess in her new home.

We escorted a goddess back to her homeland.

We’ve given talks at Google; The Pacific Palisades Historical Society; UCLA; The National Press Club; Society for the Preservation of Greek Heritage/Friends of the New Acropolist Museum; The Jonathan Club of Los Angeles; Chapman University; Central Michigan University; The Walters Art Museum; UPenn Law School; UPenn Museum; The Harvard Club of New York City; The National Arts Club; Princeton University; Villanova Law School; Rutgers University; New York University; Cardozo Law School;  Archaeological Institute of America (NY Chapter); SAFE; The Benson Family Farm; Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle; Powell’s Books in Portland; The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco;  Loyola Law School; University of Kore in Enna, Sicily; Book Soup on Hollywood Blvd; Barnes and Noble of Thousand Oaks; and the LA Festival of Books.

Looking forward, we’re hard at work on WikiLoot, our new initiative to crowdsource the fight against the illicit antiquities trade.

Thanks to you, our dedicated readers, for helping us achieve all this and more over the past year.

Jason and Ralph

PS: It’s not too late to recommend Chasing Aphrodite to a friend. But you better hurry up: last we checked, Amazon only had 11 copies left!