Word: puzo
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...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 blankets and jammed airline lounges throughout the free-time world...
...paperback success. Authors like John Jakes (The Bastard), institutions like the Agatha Christie estate, romancers like Rosemary Rogers and Victoria Holt owe their millions to the modest little 7-in. by 4-in. volumes that decorate racks at drugstores, airports, supermarkets and book emporiums. No wonder that Mario Puzo's latest effort excited such frantic bidding. With paperback rights, the successful bidder would be able to saturate those ubiquitous wire racks?if Puzo's track record is any guide?with one of next year's biggest blockbusters. Stores would be clamoring for every paperback copy of Fools Die they could...
...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...
Weeks before the Puzo sale, competing publishers had laid intricate game plans that many would scrap to stay in the race. Final offers from runners-up Ballantine and Pocket Books were both $2.5 million, only $50,000 short of N.A.L. That seems a relatively small gap, but it is a chasm to the bidder already hundreds of thousands of dollars over his limit. In such cases, terms of the sale tip the balance...
...Mario Puzo, author (The Godfather): "I find that the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading...