Publishers Lunch

Action at Retailers and Wholesaler Distribution giant Source Interlink — the largest ID magazine and book distributor, and the primary distributor of CDs and DVDs to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders — is featured in the WSJ’s Heard on the Street column as potentially closing in on a sale to private-equity groups or management following a long period of being shopped. “People familiar with the matter say no deadline has been set for bids, but a deal could come in the next two months.” For now, though, investors are betting the other way. They have massively shorted the company’s […]

FICTION Debut Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s DR. OLAF VAN SCHULER’S BRAIN, a collection of linked short stories tracing a family of doctors in New York City from 1664 through the present day, to Antonia Fusco at Algonquin, in a nice deal, by Eve Bridburg at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (World). ebridburg@zshliterary.com Abiola Abrams’s DARE, the story of a talented Ph.D. student who is mistakenly identified and bursts onto the rap scene as Gang Gurl X; based on the first urban hip hop adult movie to be produced by Femme Productions in early 2007, to Selena James at Pocket, by Alexis Hurley […]

Schedule Notes I’m off to the Stanford Publishing Course briefly tomorrow morning, and then come back to drop off our book reviewer at camp, so there will be no regular Lunch served until Tuesday. As ever, deals, jobs and everything else at PublishersMarketplace.com (including news links from the home page) will continue apace. Options Questions Hit BN A Barnes & Noble shareholder filed suit against the company alleging that they improperly backdated stock option grants to their executives on multiple occasions. The company said in a statement it “believes there is no merit to the complaint and that its practices […]

Short Items Rappers have apparently adopted the 1998 book THE 48 LAWS OF POWER as “the bible for behavior in the hip-hop world,” the LAT reports, “largely as a result of rap artists’ growing sense of themselves as an entrepreneurial warrior class.” “Geeky white guy” author Robert Greene is now “fashioning himself into an unlikely consigliere to hip-hop’s elite,” including collaborating on a business book with 50 Cent. LAT The Library of Congress has announced authors participating in the sixth annual National Book Festival, scheduled for the end of September. Release In an NYT op-ed piece, Katha Pollitt reflects on […]

Borders Expected to Hire Department Store Exec Borders is close to hiring the former head of Sak’s department store group George Jones to replace Greg Josefowicz as CEO. Jones ran the unit (which does not include the Sak’s stores themselves) for four years before resigning last September, and he was previously president of world-wide licensing and studio stores at Warner Bros. The WSJ reports that the board will consider Jones imminently. They quote a “person familiar with the situation” as saying Jones sees the job as a chance to “do something great.” In other personnel news, John Oakes has decided […]

Original Felt Co-Author Sues Over Value that Never Materialized Ralph de Toledano filed suit last week in Washington, DC against Mark Felt, his son and attorney John O’Connor, alleging that he would not have signed away rights for just $5,000 to the 1979 book he co-authored with Felt if they hadn’t concealed that Felt would reveal he was Deep Throat. The suit claims that the Vanity Fair article which broke the news “increased the value of the book rights to a reported $1 million,” the Washington Times says, though the marketplace has already proven that sum as vastly overstated. Washington […]