Wrong-footed Harvard

It struck me the other day that Harvard University Press appears to have been caught off guard by the runaway success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.   They moved up the publication date, apparently once they woke up to the fact that the great and good were already reading it (and in French too, not so?).  They let it go out with dreadful, amateurish, high school graphics--the kind of thing you would expect from an academic on a tight research budget, not from the nation's leading purveyor of learning.*  And now this, from today's email:

They did not add: none of which we expect to find anywhere within shouting distance of the Amazon best seller list, but hey, we never ever expected that of Piketty, either.

Afterthought: shouldn't it be "piqueté?

*But Joel suggests that the lousy graphics have more to do with the economics of publishing.  I.e., ten years ago they might have sprung for better, no budget for that any more.