Word: paperback
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...vending machine, but Subsidiary Rights Director Irene Webb, 30, and her colleagues were not leaving their desks. June 15, 1978, was a day for executive field rations. Since 9:30 a.m. Webb's ear had been grafted to her telephone, accepting bids for what ended as the most expensive paperback auction in publishing history: $2.2 million for the rights to reprint Mario Puzo's new novel, Fools Die, plus $350,000 to reprint his alltime bestselling saga, The Godfather. The previous record price, $1.9 million, was paid for Colleen McCullough's Australian sheep opera, The Thorn Birds, now playing beach...
...first hard-cover edition of Fools Die is not scheduled to go on sale until October. This meant that the paperback publishers were bidding that June day on futures, as if the book were listed on the commodity exchange along with soybeans and pork bellies. With good reason. The booming paperback business can become as risky, and profitable, an arena as the stock market and the gambling casino. Fortunes have changed hands at paperback auctions and reprint sales; unknowns have become overnight celebrities because of a paperback success. Authors like John Jakes (The Bastard), institutions like the Agatha Christie estate...
This summer is the Lampoon's balmiest yet. Last month the magazine published its Sunday Newspaper Parody, an eight-section, $4.95 send-up of Middle American journalism that is starting to hit trade-paperback bestseller lists. This week the magazine's first film venture, a college satire titled National Lampoon's Animal House, opens in 600 theaters nationwide. Bolstered by good reviews and Star, John Belushi, the movie is already playing to smash business in New York City and should return a hefty profit on its modest $2.7 million production cost...
...little further out of the Square on Brattle St., the Paperback booksmith sells largely the same assortment as Harvard Bookstore. The decor is more in the '60s style and the atmosphere is a little less intense, and as a bonus, you can usually find more weirdos browsing there than anywhere else in town. Again, the prices are whatever is printed on the cover, so don't come looking for any sensational bargains. You're sure to find any and all popsychology books, plus the Rolling Stones-'60s revival volume you've been looking for so long, so spend away...
...Malcolm Fewtrell, the Buckinghamshire detective superintendent assigned to the case, was the first to title his account of the crime The Train Robbers. The principal distinction of Piers Paul Read's similarly named book is that its author is also a record holder of sorts. In 1974 the paperback rights to Alive, his bestseller about the Andes plane crash victims who survived on protein obtained from their dead comrades, sold for $1.2 million. It was, at the time, the most ever known to be paid for a new book...