From a mental-health professional’s point of view, Frank thinks Biden — with a life shaped by grief and resilience, those favorite topics of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts — is a fascinating subject. Yet it seems no one is beating a path to his door in search of a book on the current chief executive’s unconscious mind. “Some people have asked me about it, but I haven’t really been approached by any particular publishing house,” he says. “So I don’t think there are people who want it. And I don’t know why.”

A look at the data might help explain. Sales for even well-reviewed Biden books by respected authors have been anemic: New York magazine correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti’s buzzy book on the Biden-Obama relationship has sold just north of 1,000 hardcover copies since it dropped in September, according to numbers from Bookscan. My colleague Ben Schreckinger’s well-received, deeply reported 2021 book on the Biden family has a Bookscan number just above 4,000 in hardcover. And Associated Press reporters Darlene Superville and Julie Pace’s book on First Lady Jill Biden notched 1,867 in hardcover. (Bookscan numbers, which are considered relatively rough, measure cash-register sales, rather than units shipped by publishers; library, institutional, and bulk sales also don’t get included.)

More notable than the sales figures is the general paucity of output. Whether it’s quickie biographies of flash-in-the-pan political celebs, memoirs from campaign insiders, hate-reads from administration critics, or important works of analysis from journalists or policymakers, there’s just not much in the offing.

[Maybe no one in the media industry wants people taking too close a look at Biden? Hmmm. — Ed]