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Hot Deals: A Whale of a Price
Judy Quinn -- 6/15/98
...was paid by Viking Penguin in a rumored $1.2 millon U.S. rights-only, one-book, hard/soft preempt for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, a proposal by Nantucket-based maritime expert Nathaniel Philbrick that delves into the juicy historic 19th-century shipwreck -- complete with angry sperm whale and hints of survivors' cannibalism -- that also served as the inspiration for Moby Dick. With this deal, agent Stuart Krichevsky has another reason to thank his bestselling Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger: Philbrick called Krichevsky to invite Junger to speak at his Egen Institute of Maritime Studies and then got around to discussing the book idea. Philbrick, who has written two other books for regional small presses, has new material to draw from, most particularly a newly discovered survivor's journal that provides a different perspective from the more sanitized and stereotypical account published by another survivor, Owen Chase, soon after the event (Narratives of the Wreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, still in print from Dover Publications). Viking editor Kris Puopolo, who also handled Dava Sobel's Longitude in paperback and clinched Sobel's upcoming switch to the house, will serve as editor on the book, which is tentatively scheduled for publication next summer. At press time, Krichevsky had also accepted his first foreign publisher preempt, a rumored mid-six-figure offer from German publisher Karl Blessing, who read the proposal while vacationing in Nantucket just after BEA.

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