PTL and Pass the Ammunition

Lest anyone question why the production department at St. Martin’s might be getting mass ulcers, that house, which will publish Peter Meyer’s “Defiant Patriot: The Life and Exploits of Lieutenant Oliver L. North” in September, is also rushing a book on TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker into print. The book, with an operative title of “Edge of Disaster,” will be written by former Bakker bodyguard Mike Richardson and Harriet McDougal, a one-time editor at Tor Books. The Bakker book will be shipped at about the same time as the North book.

LOVE SONG TO A HUNK OF ASPHALT: To commemorate its 50th anniversary, award-winning photographer Stephen Wilkes spent a year of 18-hour days and seven-day weeks photographing California’s Pacific Coast Highway, the legendary Route 1. The result is a wildly colorful book, “California One: The Pacific Coast Highway,” due out in October from Friendly Press. “To call California 1 a highway, or even as the federal government has designated it, America’s first Scenic Highway, misses the point,” Wilkes said. “It’s like calling the Great Wall a fine piece of masonry.”

MARRIAGE, PUBLISHING STYLE: Schocken Books, known for publishing such authors as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Harold S. (“When Bad Things Happen to Good People”) Kushner, has been bought by Random House. Schocken will continue as part of Pantheon Books, a Random House subsidiary.

MORE LITERARY GLASNOST : Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz has launched plans for a collection of prose and poetry by major U.S. and Soviet authors. Said Tatiana Kudryavtseva, vice president of the Board of Literary Translation of the Soviet Writers Union, of the project, “We are aware that even when we have had difficult relations at the political level, the cultural level was always open. Through this channel we feel the pulse of important cultural life in each other’s country.”

WOOF: Hot on the hoofs of its best-selling “Dogue,” Maine Street Press is coming out with “CQ,” for Canine Quarterly. Ina Schell’s “parody of the world’s most elegant magazine for men” will be published in October, and includes “the first and only appearance in book form of the original party animal, Spuds MacKenzie.”

AWARD WINNERS: Los Angeles dentist, expert fencer, guitar maker and mother of three, Faye Kellerman has received the Mystery Readers of America’s Macavity Award for “The Ritual Bath” (Arbor House). Native Angeleno Gregory Orfalea, editor of the Small Business Administration’s newspaper Network, has been named a winner of the Ithaca House Series national poetry competition. Los Angeles’ own County Public Library has won a 1987 Achievement Award from the National Assn. of Counties for its “books by mail” service.

ELEMENTARY, DEAR SHERLOCK: Stephen King is the latest author to add his name to “The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” King’s 11,000-word short story, “The Doctor’s Case,” will be the longest entry in this collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories written by eminent mystery writers in honor of the centennial of the first appearance in print of Conan Doyle’s famous detective. The anthology is scheduled for publication in November, from Carroll & Graf.

CHANGING PLACES: Elisabeth Sifton has left her position as vice president of Viking Penguin and publisher of Elisabeth Sifton Books to become executive vice president of Alfred A. Knopf.

R.I.P.: Medallion Books, the Los Angeles-based experiment in “incentive reading” has folded. Openly modeled after cosmetics companies and other businesses that offer points and payoffs to purchasers (who in turn serve as sellers), Medallion began to fall on rough times as major executives fled this spring. By June, not long after the failing company had relocated to Washington, it was all over.

STAR STORY: Barbara Leaming, biographer, most recently, of Orson Welles, has signed on with Viking to write “Rita Hayworth: Her Story.” Due out in 1990, the book will explore what Leaming calls Hayworth’s “deeply troubled and complex personality.”

DIAL OM: San Jose Mercury News writer John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, a New York Times scribe, will collaborate on “Monkey on a Stick,” the story of the murder of Steve Bryant by a Hare Krishna hit man. The two writers previously covered the story for Rolling Stone.

SUING: Former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius has announced he will sue the author of a book who says he knew in advance of a plan to sink the Greenpeace “Rainbow Warrior” ship in a New Zealand harbor in 1985. The author of the book, “Mission Oxygen,” uses a pseudonym, Patrick du Morne Vert, wears a mask and says he is a former secret service officer.

YALTA REVISITED: Better known as the site of major peace treaty negotiation, the Crimea resort of Yalta was the setting for the first meeting of the newly formed International Assn. of Crime Writers. Among the first orders of business was the establishing of awards in crime writing, honoring “the best in the genre, worldwide.”

IN MEMORIAM: Award-winning poet Robert Francis, author of 12 books during his 50-year writing career and a close friend of Robert Frost, died recently in Northampton, Mass. He was 85.

REMEMBERING FRED: When it is published in October by Carroll & Graf, Bill Adler’s “Fred Astaire: A Wonderful Life” will have an impressive first-run of 100,000 copies.

JOINT VENTURE: In an unusual co-publishing arrangement, Waldenbooks and the Crown Publishing Group’s Outlet Book Co. are forming a new mass market paperback line. The Crown-Walden program will publish 12 titles a month in the areas of romance, mystery, horror, espionage, men’s adventure, science fiction, fantasy, Western and young adult.

BARELY IS THE VERDICT IN: Legal scholar George P. Fletcher, a professor of criminal law at Columbia University, will examine the landmark case of Bernhard Goetz in “A Crime of Self-Defense,” to be published next spring by The Free Press. Said Fletcher, “We have yet to fully realize the consequences of this trial on the issues of crime, race, the law of self-defense and criminal responsibility in contemporary America.”

HOW BIG IS HISTORY? So big that as the History Book Club Inc. celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, the 105,000-member organization has recently completed a 7,600-square-foot addition to its 13,000-square-foot headquarters in Stamford, Conn.