Much to Do About Something

Getting through to the Kremlin is a lot easier than getting a response from most publishers, says John Boswell in “The Awful Truths About Publishing: Why They Always Reject Your Manuscript--and What You Can Do About It” (Warner Books). On the brighter side, Boswell says that 53,000 books did manage to get published in this country last year, so evidently, there is a lot you can do about it. Boswell is co-author of “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School.” But publishing (haven’t we always known this?) is no place for a nice MBA.

CLASSIC ACT: Spurred by the success of its 60th anniversary editions, the Book-of-the-Month-Club Inc. has decided to offer its Classics, facsimile editions of some of the most memorable books the club has published, on an ongoing basis. Along with such current Classic titles as “The Thurber Carnival” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the club will publish “In Cold Blood,” “Native Son” and “The Last Hurrah” as forthcoming Classics.

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK: Delacorte Press is betting heavily on the success of “In Love and Friendship.” Scheduled for publication Feb. 13, the first novel by Hilary Norman was such a success in an advance giveaway promotion at last spring’s American Booksellers Assn. convention that the publisher is offering a 100% refund of the purchase price to any dissatisfied reader.

NAME GAME: Joseph Cotten’s autobiography for Mercury House, due out in April, turns out to be titled “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere,” not “Orson and Me.” Cotten was among the actors in the Mercury Theater, founded in 1937 by Orson Welles and John Houseman.

APPARENTLY WE WERE NOT AMUSED: It is Queen Mother Elizabeth, not her royal daughter, who reportedly has been known to call down to the kitchen to see if there is “any old queen down there who can bring an old queen up here a gin and tonic?” This updated information comes directly from Paul James and Peter Russell, authors of “At Home With the Royal Family” (Harper & Row).

SEXY EDITOR: Best-selling author, journalist and marketing consultant Alexandra Penney is joining Bantam Books Inc. in the dual capacity of editor-at-large and publisher of a new, as yet-unnamed Bantam imprint. Penney is the author of “How to Make Love to a Man,” “How to Make Love to Each Other” and “Great Sex.”

VOICES: What the writers have in common is political repression: banning, exile or imprisonment. And so PEN American Center and PEN Writers-in-Exile Center/USA declared Monday, Nov. 17, PEN’s Writers-in-Prison Day. Christine Baranski, Joseph Brodsky, Dennis Brutus, E. L. Doctorow, William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, Fritz Weaver and Sigourney Weaver were among those reading selections from authors including Mila Aguilar, Reza Baraheni, Breyten Breytenbach, Ariel Dorfman, Kim Chi Ha, Hiber Conteris, Pablo Cuadra, Mahmoud Darwish and many others. The event took place at St. Peter’s Church in New York.

I’M SELLING AS FAST AS I CAN: Alighting in the Big Apple for a two-week blitzkrieg, San Diego literary agent Sandra Dijkstra found herself discussing upcoming titles over breakfast with Carol Southern, vice president and editorial director of Clarkson N. Potter Inc. “Did you say June Allyson? Is she still alive?” asked the total-stranger woman at the next table. “Exercises for Creative Aging? That’s a great idea! I’d buy that book! I’d buy it for my mother!”

Dijkstra swears she didn’t plant the person there at Sarabeth’s Kitchen on the Upper West Side, but soon she and Southern were borrowing her as a kind of ad hoc, independent consumer marketing survey. Two other Dijkstra projects that scored high: “If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?” forthcoming from San Francisco writer Susan Page; and, from San Diego psychologist Dean Delis (with Cassandra Phillips), the tentatively titled “The Passion Paradox: Why Love Turns Into Pain and What to Do About It.”

ATTENTION K MART SHOPPERS: Waldenbooks, the nation’s largest bookseller, says it will have 120 Reader’s Markets in K Mart stores--up from the present 17--by 1987. Also in 1987, Walden will open five Walden Kid stores, carrying only such children’s items as books, videocassettes and audiocassettes.

DEATH BY P. R.: Showing that publicity people will stop at nothing short of murder to promote their products, Worldwide Library staged a “Minor Murder” party to tout Andrew Neiderman’s new mystery, “Reflection.” In this case, as writers have long suspected, it was not the butler who did it, but, more likely, the editor.

NOTES FROM THE COURT: Who was the “Lawyer From Hell?” He promised his client everything, then went golfing. In his spare time, he hung around with Mouthpiece A. Shyster, Letme Atim and U. R. Disturbed, some of the characters (savory and otherwise) who populate Wesley J. Smith’s “The Lawyer Book.” As this “nuts-and-bolts guide to client survival” from Price/Stern/Sloan admonishes, “The three-piece suits are coming! The three-piece suits are coming!”

LIONIZING: Every year, the tables at the New York Public Library’s Literary Lions dinner are spoken for months in advance, generally by the same loyal hosts who are eager to contribute $15,000 to the library to sponsor a table and an author designated as a lion. Among donors this year are Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Lily Auchincloss, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bernstein, Bill Blass, Mr. and Mrs. Carter Burden, Mrs. Katharine Graham, Dr. and Mrs. Vartan Gregorian, Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Heinz II, and Mrs. and Mrs. Andrew Heiskell.

This year’s lions, presented with golden lion’s head medallions, are Rita Mae Brown, Alistair Cooke, Nora Ephron, Betty Friedan, Theodor Geisel, John Guare, Philip Hamburger, Joseph Heller, Mario Vargas Llosa, J. Anthony Lukas and John McPhee. Also elevated to lion status this year: James Merrill, Brian Moore, Marsha Norman, Joyce Carol Oates, James Reston, Lore Segal, Gay Talese, Calvin Tomkins, Derek Walcott and C. Vann Woodward.

ITALY ON THE WEST COAST: Franco Zeffirelli loves Hollywood so much that he views it as an adjunct of his native land, or so he says in his new autobiography for Weidenfeld & Nicolson. His story--inhabited as it is by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas and Laurence Olivier--reads like something he might be inclined to adapt to the screen.

THE KIDDIE CONNECTION: Little, Brown & Co. has acquired the children’s book program of the Atlantic Monthly Press, and with it, Melanie Kroupa, editor of the Atlantic’s children’s list since 1977. Kroupa and her staff will move to the Little, Brown offices in Boston, from which their forthcoming books for young readers will be published under the new imprint Joy Street Books.

TURN LEFT AT THE TRAVEL BOOK SECTION: Fodor’s Travel Guides, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has been acquired by Random House from United Newspapers. In 1986, 121 titles were available from Fodor’s, a line that began with the publication of “1936 . . . On the Continent.”

NEW LINE: With “Guilt: Letting Go,” by Lucy Freeman and psychotherapist Herbert S. Strean, John Wiley & Sons will launch a new line of trade psychology books. Series editor Herb Reich stresses that the line, scheduled to begin in December, will not be pop psychology books. “Instead,” Reich said, “Wiley’s trade psychology series will focus on serious issues that will interest the sophisticated reader.”

COSTS: Printing costs for U.S. publishers hit about $2.2 billion in 1985.