A Springtime Preview of Next Fall’s Big Books

It was Christmas in May in Anaheim last weekend when more than 22,000 people attending the American Booksellers Assn. convention looked over the fall publishers’ lists and predicted best sellers for the holiday season. Not too much guesswork is needed to list probable winners, as a great number of proven authors have books due in the coming months.

To highlight only a few from the crowd: Judith Krantz’s novel, “Till We Meet Again” is set in the first half of the century in Europe and California; the party Crown and Bantam threw in her honor was held in a hangar at the John Wayne Airport, where period decoration included a real Spitfire plane. Susan Isaacs’ “Shining Through” (Harper & Row) was launched with a party aboard the Queen Mary. Sidney Sheldon arrives with “The Sands of Time” (William Morrow) and Alice Hoffman with “At Risk” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons); Random House will publish E. L. Doctorow’s “Billy Bathgate,” and Simon & Schuster will offer Larry McMurtry’s “Anything for Billy.” In nonfiction, a sure attention getter is Shana Alexander’s “The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Drugs and the Mafia” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and Alfred A. Knopf will offer historian Barbara Tuchman’s “The First Salute.”

Corporate consolidation in the book business becomes more evident every year. Random House gave out catalogues from all the imprints under its corporate umbrella in a package that approximated the heft of a briefcase. Exhibits at the booths occupied by the Bantam/Doubleday/Dell conglomerate were unified by a “walk of the stars” on the carpet, naming the group’s stellar authors.

The Christmas spirit reigns at the convention not only because of the focus on the holiday season (Collins Publishers’ booth was a cozy living room with a Christmas Tree to promote “Christmas in America”), but also because of the hundreds of promotional giveaways offered by exhibitors. Contest prizes ranged from the golden Corvette raffled off by Golden Books to an archeological dig sponsored by Workman to promote “Digging Dinosaurs” by John R. Horner and James Gorman.

The most common promotional device is simple giveaways: reading copies, posters, items to wear and ingest, and all manner of knickknacks designed to make a title stick in the mind. Not just any giveaway will do, however. One of the people strolling the floor was cookie baron Wally (Famous) Amos, promoting his Donald I. Fine book, “The Power in You.” As he picked up a cookie given away by one exhibitor, it crumbled in his hand, prompting him to growl: “What kind of a cookie is this?” No stranger to hype (before the cookie empire, he worked at William Morris Agency), he advised: “Next time, use mine”--and handed one over.

FOR THE MOVIE CROWD: The entertainment business is always a good subject for books, and this season will see no lack of titles. Among the forthcoming books is A. Scott Berg’s “Goldwyn: A Biography” from Alfred A. Knopf. There are two on Shirley Temple Black: her own book, “Child Star” (McGraw-Hill), and Anne Edwards’ “Shirley Temple: American Princess” (William Morrow). Bugs Bunny et al will serve as the subject for two books as well: From Henry Holt, “That’s All Folks! The Art of Warner Brothers Animation” by Steve Schneider, and the antithetically titled “That’s Not All Folks” about Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand cartoon voices (Warner Books). From Pantheon Books will come “Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel” by Michael Barson, a book about the Marx Brothers’ radio show of the same name that aired in 1932-33. Among the expensive gift books in this area will be Harry N. Abrams’ “De Mille Family” by Anne Edwards and Ballantine’s “Masters of Starlight: Photographers in Hollywood” by David Fahey and Linda Rich.

WHAT IS THE NEW AGE?: Publishers, authors and booksellers representing the phenomenon called The New Age were an overwhelming presence. An overflow crowd of booksellers who have been besieged by customers asking for books on such topics as channeling, crystals and psychic healing flocked to a panel discussion entitled, “Demystifying New Age Books.” Newcomers to the field hoped to find a system for choosing from the vast quantity of titles on display. The New Age Publishing and Retailing Alliance, formed last year at the convention, now has 200 members, though one of its missions is to define itself. The director of Minnesota publishing house Illuminated Way expressed the irony of the current popularity: “I’ve been in business since 1965--long before it was fashionable to call it the New Age.” -

A VOGUE IN SECOND CITIES: The reading copies distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” can’t help but put one in mind of the current hot title, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” The new novel, due out in September, concerns a plot to take over the city of St. Louis. The FSG staff have high hopes for it, and the publisher has assigned it a sizeable promotional budget.

LAUNCHING NEW WRITERS: Exciting attention for unknown writers is a perennial problem and one with which Soho Press, a fairly new publishing house itself, is also wrestling. When advertising manager Susan Bergholz asked Margaret Diehl to write a routine author’s biography for her book, “Men,” she got “a wonderful essay.” Bergholz decided to distribute the notes as an introduction to the author. Inspired by the response, she will try the same tactic for another of Soho’s forthcoming novels, “Through the Night” by Edward Allen. The manuscript, which came in over-the-transom, is about a meat packer who has a breakdown. “The author sings and plays the guitar in pubs in Ohio,” says Bergholz. “He’s got to have a good story to tell about himself.”

THE VALUE OF EARLY WORKS: Because of a lawsuit brought by John Cheever’s family, Academy Chicago vastly reduced the number of sample readers from its projected fall title, “The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever, 1930-1981.” The Cheever family is seeking to invalidate the publishing contract on grounds of false representation; they claim to have insufficient control over the selection of material and to have objections to the preface by Scott Donaldson. (Donaldson is also author of “John Cheever: A Biography,” due to appear from Random House this month.) Some of Cheever’s early stories were reportedly excluded from previous collections because the Knopf editor and Cheever considered them “embarrassingly immature.” A cover line on Academy’s sampler reader containing three stories prepared for the convention reads: “This sampler is not authorized by the family of John Cheever.”

JOHN LENNON ANNIVERSARY:Three fall titles will treat the musician and one-time Beatle: Macmillan’s “Imagine” is a $39.95 tie-in with the Warner Bros. movie, “Imagine: John Lennon.” Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, has written a memoir, “John Lennon: My Brother” with Geoffrey Guiliano; the introduction is by Paul McCartney (Holt). And William Morrow will issue what promises to be a controversial biography, “The Lives of John Lennon” by Albert Goldman. The author of “Elvis” and “Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce,” Goldman will trace the history of the Beatles by “following the money.”

REDRESSING THE TRADE DEFICIT: Because of the West Coast location of ABA this year and the position of the dollar, Japanese publishers attending the ABA this year numbered 20--twice as many as last year. “Publishers who have never been here before came ready to purchase,” said Tom Mori of the Tokyo-based Tuttle-Mori Agency. Deals negotiated at the show included Japanese publisher Shinchosha’s acquisition of translation rights to the “Gone With the Wind” sequel. The book will appear simultaneously with the English edition, for which Warner Books recently paid $4.9 million. Japanese rights purchases vastly outweighed American purchases of translation rights, said Mori, who joked that the publishing sector is “helping the balance of trade.”

ELSEWHERE IN TRANSLATION: A new publisher exhibiting for the first time this year was Eridanos Press, whose stated goal is to introduce Americans to books “that are considered modern classics abroad but have been unavailable in English.” One of the noteworthy commitments of the house is to include the name of the translator in all material that mentions the book--a professional recognition that translators are rarely accorded. The house’s first list appeared this spring and included the widely acclaimed “Posthumous Papers of a Living Author” by Robert Musil; translated by Peter Wortsman. The fall list offers six books; several of the prize-winning European authors have never before been translated into English.

The staff at Knopf, citing successful translations of recent years (such as “Perfume”), are excited about another foreign acquisition, “Dictionary of the Khazars,” translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric. The book was originally published in Yugoslavia and is currently a best seller in Europe. Author Milorad Pavic’s narrator is a 17th-Century Serbian warlord. The book will be published in separate editions for male and female readers that differ in only 17 lines--but those lines are crucial, the publisher says. The book is due in October.

AIDS EDUCATION PROJECT: Various members of the publishing community have donated time and materials to produce and distribute a free information book designed to encourage participation in the battle against AIDS. “You Can Do Something About AIDS,” edited by Sasha Alyson of Alyson Publications, contains an introduction by Elizabeth Taylor, an open letter to parents from Abigail Van Buren and articles from such diverse contributors as Jody Powell, Whoopi Goldberg, Dr. C. Everett Koop, James Carroll, Harvey Fierstein and Greg Louganis. Already in its second printing, the book is due for a third printing in July.

SO. CAL. BOOKSTORE MOVE: Seen at the show was Larry Todd, until recently general manager of Hunter’s Books, which closed several stores in the L.A. area a few months ago. Todd announced that he is opening The Bookstore of Palm Desert. How soon? “I’m going to plug in the cash register as soon as I get back from ABA.”

MARKETING TO CHILDREN: Several publishers have noticed that the number of strollers wheeled about on the trade show floor has increased as well as in the number of children’s books being ordered for bookstores. Los Angeles-based publisher Price/Stern/Sloan accordingly opted for a public-service-style advertising medium during the show: underwriting the day care room at the convention center. In addition to dropping the cost of care, the publisher provided entertainment by the artists represented in its product line, among them the Wee Sing Ladies. A similar approach to booksellers was Workman’s breakfast for children, at which Gregory Stock tested the ideas in his forthcoming “Kids’ Book of Questions.”

The Library of Congress has designated 1989 as “The Year of the Young Reader,” and a campaign modeled after 1987’s “Year of the Reader” is in preparation. Workshops at the convention enlisted bookseller support for the campaign; one organizer presenting promotional ideas to retailers quipped that if all went well, the following year might be designated “The Year of the Prereader.”