The Da Vinci Coady
Quick: a dream scenario for a reading-guide masterpiece. How about the biggest authors writing essays about the books that influenced them most as collected by one of the country's best-known booksellers? That's a description, barely exaggerated, for what Bill Shinker has signed at Gotham—The Book That Changed My Life, a collection of 100 essays on titles personally resonant to Wally Lamb, Frank McCourt, David McCullough and plenty others, co-edited by juggernaut bookseller Roxanne Coady of R.J. Julia. (The putative hook is that the authors have all read at the store.)
As if all the literary star power weren't enough to make competing editors jealous, there's an altruistic thread: some profits will be donated to Coady's Read to Grow children's literacy foundation. The book, also co-edited by freelance editor Joy Johannessen and bought from Esther Newberg, is out next summer; Gotham's Erin Moore will edit the editors.
The Nagasaki Project
George Weller was one of the first reporters in Nagasaki after the bombing in 1945, but it's taken 60 years to tell his remarkable story. The late correspondent for the Chicago Daily-News (Weller died at 95 three years ago) snuck into the city and wrote some of the earliest and most brutal accounts of the bombing's consequences. But his dispatches were censored by the U.S. military, and many were never published. Now Henry Dunow is shopping a proposal, after Weller's son recently unearthed the pieces in his father's papers. The book is described as slim—about 75 pages of writing and a number of photographs. Weller's own story is compelling enough. As a correspondent, he escaped from the Gestapo, was imprisoned by the Communist Chinese, swam the Bosporus and won a Pulitzer. Watch the Briefing for updates on a sale.
How Condé Nasty?
Steve Florio is the latest media exec to parachute-and-tell. Or is he? The retirement-bound Advance Publications exec—he's currently vice chairman and has held a number of prominent roles—has signed with Crown's Rick Horgan for at least a solid six; the book is titled Managing the Gods. But how does Florio really feel about working with these divinities? Crown maintains it's largely a guide to good business, based on personal anecdotes, full of "the brilliant people he's interacted with" and "not a tell-all." But some accounts have Florio spilling about former colleagues like Ron Galotti, Bonnie Fuller and William Shawn. Food & Wine fight, anyone?
The Briefing
This week's Small Press Buy of the Week comes courtesy of Soft Skull, from where Harcourt has scooped up Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, about atomic bomb inventors who turn up in 2003 and embark on a campaign for global disarmament, for paperback reprint. The book's just out in hardcover, but Harcourt's already convinced.... TV carpenter Eric Stromer, of the Learning Channel's Clean Sweep, will hammer away at book writing after Peter McGuigan sold his first to Bantam.…Billy Graham-mania has struck. Warner Faith has signed Time's Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy to write on the evangelical leader's relationships with presidents from Truman to Bush II, bought from Robert Barnett. This as Putnam is doing transcripts of Graham's Crusade in New York held last weekend. Sources say the evangelist is cooperating on the former and will contribute foreword and afterword to the latter.
