The mystery of Oprah's "Classics": no one seems to know what books will hit it big with America's favorite talk-show host this summer--and everybody's interested.

Sometime before the end of August, Oprah Winfrey will announce the first book to be featured in her reformatted Oprah's Book Club segment "Traveling With the Classics." Winfrey says she expects to make no more than three to five such selections a year.

"We're going to travel to the book's origin or [to the locale of the] plot--which gets very expensive if it's Russia--for a discussion of the life of the author, or the plot and [the book's] achievements and importance," she told members of the American Association of Publishers (AAP) last spring. "The measured frequency will allow readers to take their time, to spend time with one author with several books, to steep themselves in a particular classic for both elucidation and entertainment." In addition to traveling to where the book may have originated or where its story unfolds, Oprah Winfrey's Web site (oprah.com) promises to offer more information and opportunities for exchange.

So the big unanswered question is: What does it take to rate as a classic book worthy of Oprah's attention? When BIBR contacted the show, a spokeswoman would not say, stating that they were still in the planning stages.

Toni Morrison's novel Sula was the 46th and final selection of the first version of Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, which ended in April 2002, after a successful five-and-a-half year run. In September 1996, Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean was the inaugural selection. According to Winfrey, the attention her book club was beyond her wildest dreams. Yet she put the segments on hiatus for more than a year. Some news accounts reported that Winfrey closed the book club because she believed there were not enough books worthy of her recommendation. An equally plausible speculation is that she wanted to rethink her criteria so that her production staff could more effectively deal with the avalanche of books they received from eager publishers courting the marketing magic of Oprah's Book Club seal.

The publishing industry greeted Oprah's announcement of the new book segment format with delight, but then a little confusion. "No one's quite sure what she means by 'classics,'" Pat Schroeder, the AAP publishers' group president, told the Chicago Tribune. "Does she mean things we would call backlist--the oldies but goodies like To Kill a Mockingbird, or the Hemingway stories ...?

"Or does she mean Greeks and Romans and Shakespeare?"

Some African Americans in publishing have wondered whether titles by black authors would be considered. Winfrey's previous club featured titles by authors from many ethnic backgrounds, but black authors whose titles were chosen benefited greatly--among them, for example, Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day.

In her speech to the AAP last spring, Winfrey specifically mentioned Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's work in her classic pantheon. "I cannot imagine a would where there is no [William] Shakespeare," she said, "where there's no [Leo] Tolstoy (War and Peace), or George Eliot (Silas Marner), or Toni Morrison (Beloved), or [Marcel] Proust (Remembrance of Things Past), or [Ernest] Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), or [John] Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)."

Two distinct audiences eagerly await the specifics: There are the publishers, for whom millions of dollars are at stake. From 1996 to 2002, if Oprah recommended a work for her club, it virtually assured that a little-known author's book could become a best-seller.

The other interested group is Oprah's viewers. (Although no specific numbers were available on Oprah's Book Club readership, a spokeswoman said that readers come from the 21 million viewers who tune in to the broadcasts weekly.) Many of them may have struggled with so-called classic books in school and not want to relive an experience they found boring at best. But some may relish the opportunity to reread or try out such books.

"A lot of people remember the classics from high school and college, and just remember the tests and drudgery," David Ebershoff, publishing director of The Modern Library, Random House's classics imprint, told the Chicago Tribune. "You're going to appreciate [a literary classic] in a different way when you're 37."

"I am hoping that with this new venture, 'Traveling With the Classics,' to be able to invite readers throughout the world to visit or revisit a universe of books of enduring usefulness," Winfrey told the AAP publishers' group, "because I believe that the sublimity of this experience, this gift to ourselves, is something that we owe to ourselves."

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RATE AS A CLASSIC?

Gwendolyn Taylor-Davis of the New York Public Library system says classic books are titles "we are still reading and talking and fussing about." The passage of time is another means by which to measure if a book earns its place as classic material. For example, will Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale and Mama resonate 20 years from now?

A spokeswoman for Oprah Winfrey says that the organizers of the revamped Oprah's Book Club have not yet determined the criteria for classic books. While they are deliberating, we asked Taylor-Davis, 2002 New York Times Librarian of the Year for recommendations. This small sample comes from No Crystal Stair, a booklist on the black experience:

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Native Son by Richard Wright
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes

--Wayne Dawkins is a journalist, author and independent book publisher.

Wayne Dawkins is author of Black Journalists: The NABJ Story and owner of August Press in Newport News, Virginia. Dawkins was a writer and editor with daily newspapers in Virginia, Indiana, New Jersey and New York for more than two decades. Dawkins's next book, Rugged Waters (August Press), is due this summer. For BIBR, Dawkins discusses the return of Oprah's Book Club, on page 10.