Word: amber
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British Author Hunter Davies recently sold the U.S. publishing rights to his forthcoming biography The Beatles to McGraw-Hill for $150,000. Harold Robbins gets $500,000 in advance for every novel he dictates. Kathleen Winsor (Forever Amber) got $500,000 from New American Library for the paperback rights to her 1965 slow-selling novel Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West. Norman Mailer's contract with the same publisher guarantees him $450,000 apiece for his next two novels-plus a possible bonus...
...must have seemed routine to F.D.R., next to the uninhibited assurance that "You know how I have felt about you as a symbol of manliness . . . the symbol that is forever one of our great national possessions-utterances-as rare as they are precious, that will live forever in the amber of history." If F.D.R. ever squirmed, he never showed it. His small contribution to this massive collection is made up mostly of delighted thanks for Frankfurter's fawning and requests for his help: "Tell me what to write-dictate right now the note that you think I ought...
...weekly compilations omit. The volume shows how the paperback and population explosions have altered the bestseller concept. A really warm item in 1904 was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which so far has sold 1.4 million copies, nearly all of them in hard cover (it is still in print). Forever Amber has sold 1,652,837 hard-cover copies since it was published in 1944. Such once eminently respectable figures are dwarfed by the paperback trade. Peyton Place has sold only 600,000 copies in hard cover since 1956, but paperback sales added 9,300,000 more...
Seated amidst the gilt and crystal of a venerable concert hall, watching an elegantly tail-coated conductor lead a Brahms symphony, the modern concertgoer may sometimes feel that he is inhabiting a scene preserved in amber. In such a tradition-rounded realm, the conductor and everything under his sway appear to have been unaltered in half a century. His basic repertory is the same. The makeup of his orchestra and its instruments are unchanged. The auditoriums he performs in are virtually the size and shape they always were. Through an epoch of transformations that have touched nearly every human activity...
Rats in the Cordage. When Wilson writes about a woman, the malice is tangibly thick: "Her heavy amber earrings and amber necklace, her dyed black hair done in earphones so dead and scurfy that one felt that if they were lifted moths would fly out of them, her dreadful arch smile . . ." Are such caricatures intended to portray poor old Britannia? The tone is wrong for a grand historical novel; the sound is not of a foundering vessel but of rats in the stores and cordage...