In its first day on sale, “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown sold more than 1 million copies in hardcover and e-book versions in the United States, Britain and Canada, according to the publisher, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

The publisher said it had fired up the presses again and printed an additional 600,000 hardcover copies to add to the 5 million already in print.

On Tuesday, Barnes & Noble and Amazon said that “The Lost Symbol,” Mr. Brown’s first book since his worldwide phenomenon, “The Da Vinci Code,” set records for the best-selling adult fiction title on the first day of sale. BN.com, Amazon and Sony all said that e-book versions of “The Lost Symbol” went straight to No. 1 on their electronic best-seller lists, although all declined to say how many units were sold. A spokeswoman for Knopf Doubleday said the company did not break out e-book downloads specifically.

In this new book, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is again summoned to the scene of a gruesome attack, joins forces with an attractive and erudite love interest, and speeds around a world capital chasing clues, solving puzzles, and risking his life while dropping cocktail parties’ worth of scholarly minutiae. Even the setting, though new, will be familiar to most readers: Washington, D.C.

This time, Langdon is lured to the Capitol to save his mentor, Peter Solomon, a prominent member of the Freemasons who’s been kidnapped by a cryptic, heavily tattooed, Homer-reading psycho calling himself Mal’akh — a vicious fellow even less plausible than the albino monk in “The Da Vinci Code.”

Our hero is also in possession of an ancient Masonic artifact whose clues lead him on a treasure hunt to various D.C. tourist spots as he searches for a secret long hidden by the brotherhood.