"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."
—John Steinbeck
It was dinnertime at the Manhattan publishing offices of G.P. Putnam's Sons. The last bag of taco chips had long since tumbled from the corridor vending machine, but Subsidiary Rights Director Irene Webb, 30, and her colleagues were not leaving their desks. June 15, 1978, was a day for executive field rations. Since 9:30 a.m. Webb's ear had been grafted to her telephone, accepting bids for what ended as the most expensive paperback auction in publishing history: $2.2 million for the rights to reprint Mario Puzo's new novel, Fools Die, plus $350,000 to reprint his alltime bestselling saga, The Godfather. The previous record price, $1.9 million, was paid for Colleen McCullough's Australian sheep opera, The Thorn Birds, now playing beach blankets and jammed airline lounges throughout the free-time world.
The first hard-cover edition of Fools Die is not scheduled to go on sale until October. This meant that the paperback publishers were bidding that June day on futures, as if the book were listed on the commodity exchange along with soybeans and pork bellies. With good reason. The booming paperback business can become as risky, and profitable, an arena as the stock market and the gambling casino. Fortunes have changed hands at paperback auctions and reprint sales; unknowns have become overnight celebrities because of a paperback success. Authors like John Jakes (The Bastard), institutions like the Agatha Christie estate, romancers like Rosemary Rogers and Victoria Holt owe their millions to the modest little 7-in. by 4-in. volumes that decorate racks at drugstores, airports, supermarkets and book emporiums. No wonder that Mario Puzo's latest effort excited such frantic bidding. With paperback rights, the successful bidder would be able to saturate those ubiquitous wire racks—if Puzo's track record is any guide—with one of next year's biggest blockbusters. Stores would be clamoring for every paperback copy of Fools Die they could lay hands on. This, in turn, would give the publisher leverage to persuade sellers to stock other titles on the firm's list: a million-dollar domino theory.
Before the 15-hour sale ended, some bidders had grown grouchy as they saw the cost of the prize soar. "They sounded as if they had low blood sugar, and I offered to send them sandwiches," recalls Webb. For the winner, Elaine Koster, 37, editor in chief and publisher of New American Library, the problem was breathable air. The cooling system in her office overlooking a gaudy flank of the Americana Hotel had been shut off. At 8 p.m. she retreated to her more comfortable West Side apartment for the final and triumphant round.
It was literally a day for the books. In addition to the Puzo package, Koster was chasing rights to publish works by Franz Kafka. She was outbid by Pocket Books, who paid $210,000. The Prague pension clerk would have been fascinated by the rituals of a modern paperback auction. He had envisioned the adrenal new world in his novel Amerika. But could he have imagined that he would be in six figures?