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"You'd go into a bookstore and you could find 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' and James Baldwin, but you couldn't find 'Roots'?" he said. "They weren't pushing it enough."

At the time, "Roots" was still available only in a small, mass-market paperback, years after the industry had gone to the larger, more expensive and more prestigious trade paperbacks for most major titles, said Arthur Klebanoff, CEO of Scott Meredith Literary Agency in New York, who represented the Haley family.

Making the deals with Vanguard and Warner Home Video took three years, he said.

"This isn't the normal way a book goes out of print," Klebanoff added. Usually, it's due to an economic decision by the publisher. "Roots" was selling about 25,000 to 30,000 copies a year, he said, decent numbers for a 30-year-old book.

"Very few families would be prepared to play it this way," Klebanoff said. "I can't think of another example where it's happened this way."

And what would Alex Haley have thought about his family forcing "Roots" to go out of print for three years?

"He probably wouldn't have let it go out of print," William Haley acknowledged, but mainly because the publisher would have dealt with him more fairly than it did with his heirs.

Drama from Day 1

"Roots" has known controversy at every step of its existence. Author Michael Eric Dyson refers to that fact in the very first paragraph of his introduction for the new Vanguard edition.

"More than the sum of its historical and literary parts -- some of which have been rigorously criticized and debunked -- Haley's quest for his roots changed the way black folks thought about themselves, and how white America viewed them," Dyson writes.

Novelist Harold Courtlander sued Haley in 1978, claiming parts of his novel "The African" has been plagiarized. Haley eventually acknowledged the plagiarism, said it was inadvertent and settled out of court for $650,000. Historians also have cast a great deal of doubt as to whether Haley truly tracked down his ancestral village or was merely being told what he wanted to hear by the people who lived there.

But as Dyson makes clear, "Roots" transcended those issues. From the beginning, it was embraced by whites as well as blacks. ABC was so nervous that whites wouldn't watch that they scheduled it outside a sweeps period, in January. The network bosses' instincts about scheduling proved wrong, but their instincts about making it in the first place were right. Seemingly everyone watched, and it was all America could talk about the week that Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president.

Even with heavy marketing (big displays for the book and DVD at Wal-Mart are planned), it's unlikely that the relaunch of "Roots" will have anything like the effect it had the first time.

"I don't think it will have anywhere near the impact of its initial release," said Jerald Podair, professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

"In the 1970s, before the advent of multiculturalism, celebrating racial or ethnic identity through one's roots was a novel idea. It isn't anymore," Podair continued. "There's a been-there-done-that quality to 'Roots,' which will reduce it to the level of a historical artifact when it comes out again."

Resonates with blacks

If the reintroduction of "Roots" doesn't have the impact it did its first time, especially for whites, its role in the African-American community transcends whether it happens to be in print, author Thomas-Fann argued.

"We may not have been speaking of the book, but we speak of 'Roots' always, and with such endearment," she said. "Books go out of print, but we keep the story alive. The book may be forgotten someday, but not the story."

And while Amos is happy that "Roots" is being rereleased, he has had a personal copy of the DVD boxed set's original release tucked away for five years. He's been saving it, he said, for this coming October.

His granddaughter, Quiera, will turn 16. And for her birthday, he will give her "Roots."

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