A major national campaign, “Give the Gift...

A major national campaign, “Give the Gift of Literacy,” will be launched at this May’s convention of the American Booksellers Assn. in New Orleans. Intended to raise funds as well as awareness of the problems of illiteracy, the drive hopes to raise a minimum of $1 million per year for at least three years for national and local literacy organizations serving adults and children. A similar effort will be initiated later this summer by the Canadian Booksellers Assn. Funds for the U.S. campaign will be raised through customer contributions at bookstores around the country, with proceeds to be donated to the Coalition for Literacy and Reading Is Fundamental. The program is currently under test in more than 100 bookstores in Minnesota.

THE WORD: After a highly competitive auction, Catholic nun and popular TV personality Mother Angelica has signed with Harper & Row to do a book, “Mother Angelica’s Answers Not Promises,” scheduled for publication in winter 1987. Like her highly rated satellite TV program, “Mother Angelica Live,” the book--advanced for “a substantial six-figure amount”--will offer wit and spiritual wisdom on such subjects as loneliness, fear, love, guilt, death and sex. Profiled widely in the media recently, including as the focus of a “60 Minutes” segment, Mother Angelica has been described as “a combination of Ted Turner and Mother Theresa,” and is considered the first Catholic since Bishop Sheen to capture a large, interdenominational following through television. Her Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) is the fastest-growing cable network in America, and “Mother Angelica Live,” her 60-minute call-in show telecast three times each week, has a core congregation of about 30 million.

ONE MINUTE, PLEASE: Without ever leaving Palm Paradise, “One-Minute Manager” and “One-Minute Sales Person” author Dr. Spencer Johnson will road-tour the United States--via satellite TV. To publicize his latest best seller, “One Minute for Myself,” Johnson’s publisher, William Morrow & Co., has signed On the Scene Productions to conduct 20 interviews to be satellited live to news and television talk shows throughout the United States in a four-hour time period. On the Scene Productions explains that the live satellite approach “reduces the exhausting traveling conditions and expensive touring costs” that are incurred on regular book tours.

IN MEMORIAM: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, hardcover publisher for the late Bernard Malamud, has announced the establishment of a Bernard Malamud literary award to be administered by PEN, the international literary organization. Conditions and dollar amounts of the award are as yet undecided, nor has FS&G; arrived at a decision on whether to publish the novel on which the 71-year-old Malamud was working at the time of his death March 18 separately or as part of a posthumous collection.

WAR GAMES: At a meeting at Stanford University not long ago marking the publication of a collection of essays, “Makers of Modern Strategy From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age” (Princeton University Press, 1986), military historians from all over the country waged good-natured war on each other. The focus of their friendly verbal hostilities during the conference on “War in History, and War Today,” sponsored jointly by Stanford’s history department and the Hoover Institution, was why insurgents have generally defeated regular military forces ever since World War II. Arguing that war must be viewed not merely in the military arena, but also in the spheres of politics, economics and the media, Peter Paret, Spruance professor of international history at Stanford and editor of the Princeton University Press collection, declared that “to interpret war in the past we must recognize that we must deal both with its uniqueness and its profound interconnection with other forces.”

SUMMIT LESSONS: To coincide with the second Reagan-Gorbachev summit scheduled for later this summer, Atlantic Monthly Press will publish “Game Plan: How to Conduct the U.S.-Soviet Contest” by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Now a professor at Columbia University and a counselor at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brzezinski posits the theory that rather than a temporary problem, the U.S.-Soviet relationship is a historical rivalry that will endure--an “endless game” in which each side is only restrained by the fear of retaliation or the use of excessively provocative tactics.

SOVIET STUDIES: Highly acclaimed following its recent release in England, “Gorbachev: The Path to Power” has been acquired for U.S. publication by tiny Salem House Publishers of Topsfield, Mass. Along with extensive biographical material on the Soviet leader, Moscow correspondent Christian Schmidt-Hauer’s book also includes previously unpublished information about Raisa Gorbachev, quite probably the Soviet Union’s most unorthodox first lady. Since Salem House, recently acquired by Angus & Robertson--in turn owned by Bay Books of Australia, in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch--has been known best in the past for its coffee-table, carriage-type books, this new political biography represents “quite a big move,” Salem House spokesman Margery Brandfon said.

THE BOMBER AND THE BILLBOARD: Simon & Schuster’s first-ever book billboard is up now in--where else?--the Land of L.A., dominating the southwest corner of Sunset and Doheny. The picture is risque enough, what with a miniskirted lower torso leaning against a major luxury-mobile, vanity-plated BOMBER. So who is “The Sunset Bomber” (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster: $16.95)? That’s easy: It’s Harry Cain, the brainy, bronzed Hollywood criminal attorney who stars in D. Kincaid’s hot new novel. A better question is who is D. Kincaid? Even Joni Evans, president of the adult trade division at S&S;, swears she does not know the true identity of this pseudonymous author. An S&S-issued; bio says D. Kincaid was, among other distinctions, captain of the high school swimming, soccer and table tennis teams. Offered full academic scholarships to top Ivy League schools. Chose San Jose State. Holds a Ph.D. in semiotics. Left academics to play cocktail piano in Manhattan’s Eastside bars and Catskill resort hotels. Etcetera, equally outrageous. Speculation is divided over whether D. Kincaid is actually one person or a committee of writers, and no one is certain about the author’s sex. At Simon & Schuster, Toni Werbell confides: “I don’t know who it is, I swear to God, but I think it’s somebody famous.”

AND THE WINNERS ARE: In Mexico City, American Michael Mathes was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest award for foreigners, for his books on the history of Baja California and northwestern Mexico. “My dear Mexican friends deserve more recognition for this award than I do,” Mathes said. “But if this award celebrates the roots I have planted here and the pleasure I have experienced in this country, then let me say it has never been so justly received.” Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Mathes has lived in the northern Mexican border state of Sonora for 15 years. He has written more than 175 works.

Also: Swiss dramatist, novelist and diarist Max Frisch has been named the recipient of the $25,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary journal, World Literature Today, the prize is awarded every two years by a jury of writers, critics and literary scholars from around the world. Frisch was selected from a slate of 10 international authors, with Nigerian poet, dramatist and novelist Wole Soyinka chosen as runner-up. A playwright since age 16, the 75-year-old Frisch has spent most of his literary career grappling with the moral issues bound up with war.

And . . . in ceremonies at Columbia University, prizes of $4,000 each were awarded to Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and Jacqueline Jones of Wellesley College as winners of the 1986 Bancroft Prizes in American history. Jackson was chosen for his book, “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States,” published by Oxford University Press, and Jones won for her book, “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family From Slavery to the Present.” The awards are presented each year for books of exceptional merit and distinction in American history and diplomacy.

Finally: The Rea Award for the Short Story, the first juried award to focus on the short story, has been presented to Cynthia Ozick for her collections, “The Pagan Rabbi,” “Levitation” and others. Michael M. Rea, president of the Dungannon Foundation (which exists primarily to bestow the Rea Award each year), said the $25,000 award was created to honor “a living United States writer whose published works in the discipline of the short story have made a significant contribution to this art form.”

TROPIC OF HIGH PRICES: At a recent auction at Sotheby’s in New York, the original typewritten manuscript of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” brought $165,000, second in price for a typewritten or signed literary work only to the $357,500 paid last year at auction for a notebook of poetry and prose handwritten by William Butler Yeats. More than 900 pages in length, the four-volume Miller typescript is expected to be placed at New York’s Morgan Library. The typescript was purchased by rare book dealer John Fleming on behalf of an undisclosed buyer.

DEAR--VERY DEAR--OLD DAD: Berkley Books has acquired the paperback rights to Bill Cosby’s upcoming book, “Fatherhood,” set for a first-printing release of 750,000 by Doubleday on May 23, for $1.6 million, one of the highest prices paid for reprint rights in recent years. First serial rights for the wildly popular TV daddy’s book have been sold to Good Housekeeping for $90,000, with second serial rights going to the National Enquirer for an undisclosed sum. Book club rights have been purchased by the Literary Guild for a “significant sum.”

BABY TALK: Dr. Loraine Stern, a pediatrician “in the L.A. area,” is known to her patients as “Dr. Magic.” Now, with L.A.-based journalist Kathleen Mackay, Stern has written a guidebook for ‘80s parents: “Off to a Great Start!--How to Relax and Enjoy Your Baby” (Norton). The key, in the view of Stern and Mackay, is that child care should be engaged in as a joy, “not another task to master.”

SCORPION BITES: Also oyster shucking, bow-tie tying, wedding planning, turkey basting, crystal polishing, thigh thinning, tent staking, waffle making, bricklaying, egg decorating and aphid eradicating, among 1,200 other topics, are the subjects of “How to Do Just About Anything,” the new solve-every-problem guide from Reader’s Digest. The book may be among the ultimate in team efforts, with more than 100 consultants, lawyers, doctors, editors, writers and others working on the project over a two-year period.

THE WILLIAMS LEGACY: Five years before his death in 1983, playwright Tennessee Williams chose Lyle Leverich as his official biographer, and gave him “full access to my private correspondence and journals.” On March 26, the day that would have been Williams’ 75th birthday, William Morrow & Co. announced it had acquired the resulting biography, scheduled for publication next year. “Several Williams books were rushed out right after Tennessee’s death,” said Morrow president Sherry Arden. “But this is the real one. Lyle Leverich has put eight years into it, and he has extraordinary access to materials that previous biographers never saw.” The book, said Arden, “gives us the Tennessee Williams that he himself, even in his own memoirs, worked so hard to disguise.” Added Thomas Congdon, an editor of Williams’ “Memoirs” and now Leverich’s editor at Morrow: “This biography rescues Tennessee from the tawdriness that was attached to his name during his bad decade, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It gives us another person altogether--young Tom Williams of St. Louis, eccentric but very appealing.” And lest anyone question the openness and involvement of the subject, Congdon points out that once when Leverich raised the matter of candor, Williams said: “Tell the truth, baby. You can always say the ol’ houn’ dawg could be a son-of-a-bitch, and you won’t shoot wide of the mark.”

GOOD HEAVENS!: Better known for his novels of spiritual conflict and corporeal conflagration, best-selling author/sociologist Father Andrew A. Greeley has turned his pen to . . . science fiction. “God Game,” exploring the premise of what would happen if the characters in a computer game were to come to life while the player still maintained some control and influence over them, will be published in June by Warner Books, in partnership with Tor Books.

MONEY TALKS: What do Ronald Reagan, Joan Rivers, Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ruth have in common? According to Los Angeles speech therapist Dr. Morton Cooper, they are among America’s 13 best “money voices”--trademark voices that are “worth a fortune.” Cooper is the author of “Change Your Voice, Change Your Life” (Harper & Row: $5.95, paperback).

APPOINTMENTS: Known for a “blunt-spoken style that often circumvents diplomatic niceties,” U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Nicholas A. Veliotes, 57, has been appointed president of the American Assn. of Publishers (AAP). Formerly assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, one-time ambassador to Jordan and, earlier, the deputy chief of mission in Tel Aviv, Veliotes’ 31-year-career has also included senior State Department assignments in Italy, India and Laos. Announcing the appointment, AAP board chairman Jeremiah Kaplan said Veliotes’ “intellectual and diplomatic skills will enhance the efforts of the publishing industry as we pursue important issues such as piracy, intellectual property protection, taxes, postal rates, freedom to read and copyright protection.” In turn, native Californian Veliotes declared that “the vitality of the publishing industry in this country is of great importance to our culture and to all Americans who seek to learn, grow and enjoy their lives through reading. It will be my job to make certain the concerns of AAP are heard in Washington and around the world. I welcome the challenge.”

L.A.’S CHINA CONNECTION. Books Nippan, Los Angeles-based distributor of Japanese-language and bilingual books, has been asked by the Chinese government to act as liaison, collecting American and British titles for a September, 1986, “Humanities and Social Science Book Fair” in the city of Xian, Shanxi province, Peoples Republic of China. The fair will be attended by an estimated 100,000 Chinese book buyers from universities, government agencies and libraries. Books Nippan expects to exhibit 10,000 to 15,000 titles, of which they expect that 90% will be American, 10% British.

The Cultural Section of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has released a letter formally encouraging American publishers to send copies of their books to Books Nippan. About 135 publishers have already sent copies of their wares for display. The distributor asks that one exhibit copy be provided free, and a second copy at a 50% discount. There will be no charge for the shipment of the books to the People’s Republic or for space in the Xian exhibit.

Books Nippan expects to take Chinese orders at standard discounts for all the exhibited titles, with orders to be processed through the American and British publishers’ usual Chinese distributors. Publishers who have no Chinese distributor may have their orders processed through Books Nippan.

Books Nippan is a subsidiary of the giant Japanese book distributor Nippon Shuppan Hanbai Inc., whose annual sales reach $2 billion. The corporation is undertaking this mediating role not just to facilitate cultural exchange but also to introduce American and British publishers to their own company and its distribution capabilities in a part of the world where knowledge of English has now pulled ahead of the distribution capabilities of most American and British publishers. An estimated 10 million Chinese can now read English; but as English is the second language in the Chinese schools, that number is expected to grow dramatically in the years ahead.

Interested publishers should contact Scott Bowers or Gretchen Holmblad by the end of May in Books Nippan’s business office in Carson, Calif. (213) 604-9701.