Highbrow Raiser

Any highbrow knows that TV, a sinister substitute for books, is no more likely to encourage worthwhile reading than corn pone is to whet a taste for caviar. But last week the opening of a televised New York University course in comparative literature lifted the highbrows' eyebrows. Though aired by Manhattan's WCBS-TV at the brain-taxing hour of 6:30 a.m., Assistant Professor Floyd Zulli Jr.'s Sunrise Semester started a rush in the city's bookshops for the first volume on his reading list: Stendhal's The Red and the Black. Some sleepy viewers garbled it a bit, asked for The Black and Blue or "that book by Stan Hall," but one publisher alone supplied 2,600 copies to dealers in four days without slaking the demand. Said a book buyer: "I'd wager that more copies of Stendhal have been sold in New York this week than in Stendhal's lifetime."

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