Henry Holt executive editor Gillian Blake has won a hotly contested auction for New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's new book, The Sixth Extinction. Blake beat out eight other houses for the book, which will be expanded from the author's May 2009 New Yorker piece of the same name.
In the book Kolbert looks at mass extinctions throughout history and, as in her 2006 title Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury), offers a sobering look at what could be an outcome of current ecological trends. Here she focuses on how the planet could be on the verge of a major evolutionary shift: a sixth extinction. As Kolbert explains, there have been five mass extinctions throughout history, with the last being the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Blake, who began at Holt five weeks ago, acquired North American rights from Kathy Robbins at the Robbins Office, Inc.
The acquisition also marks the first major one at Holt under Steve Rubin's very new tenure; Rubin took over as president and publisher at the Macmillan division Monday. Holt is planning a fall 2012 publication for The Sixth Extinction.
