Jonathan Karp at Random, safely back in publishing after a brief fling with the movie business, was involved in two six-figure deals last week, winning an auction for one title and swiftly preempting the other after receiving a tip-off about the project. The auction was for an untitled book about Providence, R.I.'s highly colorful and seemingly eternal mayor, "Buddy" Cianci, to be written by Pulitzer Prize journalist Mike Stanton, who has been following Cianci for years for the Providence Journal. The deal, for world rights, was concluded with Andrew Blauner at his own agency, and the book will be published next year. Karp and Blauner, incidentally, were contemporaries at Brown, and therefore have an inside interest.
It was an inside tip that led to Karp's rapid preempt of a book about Ruth Harkness, the explorer who, following in her late husband's footsteps, ventured into the wilds of China in 1936 to bring back the first live giant panda to be seen in the West. It's by Vicki Croke, a columnist on animal topics for the Boston Globe, the resident animal expert on the Rosie O'Donnell show and the author of several books, including The Modern Ark and Animal ER. Croke is off to China soon to retrace Harkness's travels. On this one, Karp bought U.S. and Canadian for a solid six figures from agent Laura Blake Peterson at Curtis Brown. No title or pub date yet.
