Hubris Gets Heat In the midst of Clinton madness I missed the building buzz over the next inside the Beltway book aimed for headlines and bestseller lists: Brassey’s forthcoming IMPERIAL HUBRIS: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism, set for release on July 4. Promoted as by an “anonymous member of the U.S. intelligence community,” the NYT says the author is a “22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999.” He criticizes the Iraq invasion as “an avaricious, premeditated […]

Lagardere Confirms Interest in Hodder French media conglomerate Lagardere officially confirmed yesterday their interest in adding Hodder Headline to their Hachette unit (which includes Orion and Octopus in the UK). Dow Jones Newswires puts a higher estimate on the potential value of Hodder than we’ve seen elsewhere (by a matter of another $12 million to $25 million). DJN The Big Price Tag on Penguin UK’s Warehouse Troubles The cost of the warehouse mess at Penguin UK is now estimated at $35 million to $55 million, according to PN (and it still is not resolved yet). Managing director Tom Weldon has […]

Apologies Once Again On selected days we’ve still been accidentally sending some of you both a Deluxe Lunch and a traditional flavor one. I know it can be annoying, and I’m sorry. Without boring you with the technical details, it’s fairly complex to deliver two different mails to two separate chunks of our mailing list, and we’ve had a combination of technical issues and human error (that would be me) in mastering the new protocol. If you can hang in there, I should have this perfected soon. Here’s what makes it trickier. Some of you are receiving Lunches at a […]

Pension Problem Sidelines Smith Deal; Hodder Will Be Sold to Soothe Shareholders WH Smith “Has suspended discussions with Permira pending clarification of the level of any possible offer,” based on the expectation that the company’s massively underfunded pension makes Permira’s original bid of $1.7 billion unsustainable. A Permira spokesperson says they are still talking to pension fund officials and “We intend to revert to the company in due course.” But now disillusioned shareholders — who had bid the stock up when the offer was first made (it fell another 6.5 percent after yesterday’s announcement) — need to be satisfied, and […]

New Hardcover Head for S&S Children’s Suzanne Harper has been named svp and hardcover publisher at Simon & Schuster Children’s, starting July 6, overseeing Atheneum Books for Young Readers (including Richard Jackson Books and Anne Schwartz Books), Margaret K. McElderry Books, and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (including Paula Wiseman Books). Harper has been editor-in-chief of Disney Adventures magazine. HBSP in Big Chinese Co-Venture Harvard Business School Press is forming a partnership with The Commercial Press, China’s oldest publishing house, to publish Harvard’s books in Chinese. The ambitious venture aims to translate and publish up to 150 titles […]

NYT Parses Clinton Like Mad What we can we say about the NY Times’ curious trio of Bill Clinton stories — the news article about the book that followed the AP’s embargo buster, the premature review that followed the next day, and today’s mystifying infomercial for orchestrated right-wing reaction that actually covers/promotes Limbaugh and Drudge on page one (itself the third in David Kirkpatrick’s curious trio of articles in which the newspaper tries to manage the political positioning of Clinton during the Kerry campaign) — that you haven’t already thought to yourself? Keeping it brief, let’s try this: Given that […]