Deals; Thriller Mania; Princeton's Not Bulls****ing

by Steven Zeitchik and John Baker, with reporting by Charlotte Abbott, Jeff Zaleski and Amanda-Jane Doran, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/14/2005

The second day of the London Book Fair saw as many international offers as there are Jonathan Burnham sightings. A sampling of some, with the necessary caveats about the fluidity of these reports.

One of the hottest negotiations has Chandler Crawford selling The Shadow Man, a serial-killer thriller by a first timer named Cody McFadyen. It went to Bantam last week in a two-booker and has since gone to Hodder in the U.K., Laffont in France, Lubbe in Germany and Piemme in Italy. 'I've never seen anything go so fast. It was like the old days," said Crawford.

Princeton UP's improbably popular On Bulls***, a philosophical title by Harry Frankfurt that's been getting some big play--including a scheduled spot on The Daily Show in the U.S. tonight--has been ringing in international offers from places that include Germany and Italy; it has already sold in Brazil. Of the book's conceit--an academic taking a scholarly tone to understand the modern notion of bulls***--PUP's Ben Tate said "The joke is that there's no joke. The hook is that there is no hook."

International interest for David Gernert's The Futurist, which had sold before the fair to Doubleday's Bill Thomas in the U.S., is getting international traction here. The book's about a futurist sent to the world's trouble spots a la that old TV show Quantum Leap.

What is described as a bio of Hitler commissioned by Stalin was bought by John Murray publishing director Gordon Wise from German house Lubbe. It's the work of a German historian, Matthias Uhle, who found the document in old Soviet archive and based on Russian interrogations of Hitler's personal valet. Public Affairs had already bought it in the U.S.

And in even more brief briefs:

Harcourt's Becky Saletan has bought Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levinson, a professor of science writing at MIT, which describes the six years that Newton spent as head of the Royal Mint.

Also at Harcourt, editor Tim Bent has pre-empted North American rights for Colin Woodard's Lives of Pirates from Jill Grinberg, about how 18th century pirates banded together to form a pirate cooperative in the Bahamas.

An unlikely source, Sourcebooks, won an auction over Berkley and Harlequin for the novel The Tuesday Erotica Club by TV writer Lisa Beth Konetz; it's about a group of women in a law firm that reads their erotica to each other. "All a lot of European publishers needed to hear was the title,' said the house's Dominique Raccah.

Janklow & Nesbit has a novel by Tim Rice's sister Eva, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, that has already sold to Trena Keating at Dutton, that has now sold by its London office (which has rights) to Headline Review in the U.K. and Droemer Knaur in Germany.

The tireless Andrew Wylie has reportedly sold Alexander Chee's second novel to Web Younce at Houghton; the author's first was the acclaimed Edinburgh (which was about Korea).

Recent Whitbread winner Geraldine McCaughrean has been chosen by Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital to write the authorized sequel to Peter Pan. Barrie left the copyright to the Hospital as a gift in 1929.

And a couple other non-deal tidbits:

Distribution and its transatlantic ambitions is a big theme here; PGW and NBN both have big booths, with everyone jockeying for U.K. position and at least one deal--NBN signing the University of Wales Press--already going down.

And in a juicy item that takes us back to where this began (and, we promise, is the last time we mention his name not in the context of an actual deal), Jonathan Burnham was spotted spending an extensive amount of time at the Hyperion/Miramax table today. He said he was "working [his] way out," a process he anticipated taking--"probably a couple of weeks."