Religion: Graham's New Sermon

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Graham's book hardly breaks new ground; indeed it is little more than an extended "Crusade" sermon, illustrated by numerous homely anecdotes often involving anonymous celebrities (e.g., "one of our best-known show-biz personalities . . ."). Whatever the book's limitations, Word Books, a religious publishing subsidiary of the American Broadcasting Co., which lured Graham away from Doubleday, sees a big market and is going all out. It is running off 750,000 hard-cover copies, claimed to be the biggest first printing in publishing history. "Within a few months," a Word spokesman says, "it could well become the second-best seller of all time."