Word: paperbacks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...literally a day for the books. In addition to the Puzo package, Koster was chasing rights to publish works by Franz Kafka. She was outbid by Pocket Books, who paid $210,000. The Prague pension clerk would have been fascinated by the rituals of a modern paperback auction. He had envisioned the adrenal new world in his novel Amerika. But could he have imagined that he would be in six figures...
Nevertheless, the ever watchful godfather of The Godfather never missed a shuffle of the paperback poker game: "While I was playing tennis it was up to 1.6, something like that. Then after dinner it was 1.8. It was Ballantine, N.A.L., and up to 1.5 Bantam was in it. The last three were Pocket Books, Ballantine, N.A.L. Then at 9 o'clock I got a phone call. Ballantine and N.A.L. were up to 2.4. Then I got a final call saying that Ballantine and N.A.L. were at 2.5 and 2.55, and if it was O.K. with me, we'd take...
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...