When you're a tiny publisher, with less than a handful of employees, none of whom is a publicist, and it comes time to think about promoting your fall books, you pretty much have to hope for a miracle. New Jersey's Melville House is about to learn whether scandal will do just as well.
Last week, Vanity Fair lost a libel suit brought against it by the film director Roman Polanski. At issue was a quote from journalist Lewis Lapham about Polanski propositioning a model at Elaine's restaurant in 1969, an allegation that the woman herself finally disavowed. Lapham and Vanity Fair reps both stood by their stories, although the latter acknowledged that they might have been wrong about when the supposed proposition occurred. The incident took place almost 40 years ago, after all. Who can remember everything?
But Hoboken-based Melville House is relying heavily on Lapham's long-term memory. In October, the house will publish With the Beatles, the longtime Harper's editor's account of two weeks he spent with the Fab Four and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in an ashram in India in 1968. By his own admission no Beatlemaniac, Lapham was convinced by Melville cofounder Dennis Johnson—who put Melville on the map with the September 2003 publication of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by French philosopher/journalist/icon Bernard-Henri Lévy—to expand what were once Saturday Evening Post stories into a 150-page book. (New material will include an account of a long cab ride Lapham took with Ringo Starr, who was not fleeing the ashram because he hated the food, as was rumored at the time, but for more substantive and disturbing reasons.) The house has already had significant bookseller interest, and Johnson says he's aiming at a first printing of 25,000, which is a lot for them. Lapham is booked to read at a Manhattan B&N and is planning to go on the road in Melville's first-ever author tour.
Like the Vanity Fair article, the Beatles book calls on Lapham—famous as both a journalist and a boulevardier around media town—to remember scenes and conversations from the late 1960s. But in this case, at least, Lapham's memory was jogged by 68 pages of single-spaced, typed recollections.
Whether any of Lapham's seminotoriety will resonate with bookbuyers remains to be seen, but Johnson isn't worried. "Lewis was the one who wasn't taking acid, but he was taking notes," he explained. Besides, I believe it was the Walrus who said, "There's absolutely no such thing as bad publicity."
But making use of scandal or bad fortune to promote your book is tricky business, the first rule of which is not to look like you're doing exactly that. (It must have been a dicey day at Knopf when executives had to decide whether or how to promote their new novel, Incendiary, which centers on a terrorist attack at a London soccer match.) But Melville truly isn't even trying: Johnson and his cofounder, Valerie Merians, are going through the usual channels for the Beatles book, as well as for several of their other titles, including a novel by Bernard-Henri Lévy's daughter, Justine, and an examination of French auteur film theory by San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen—attempting, as usual, to get all the reviews and excerpts and coverage they can.
The god of book promotion is plenty powerful and sometimes works in mysterious ways. Rumor has it Lapham's book is being considered for excerpt at a big, famous New York magazine. Which magazine, you ask? Why, Condé Nast's Vanity Fair, of course.
