THERE’S a Cook book war in the making.
Martin Dugard was gnashing his teeth last week when he read that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz had nabbed an estimated $1 million advance from Henry Holt for a new book on Captain Cook.
Only last July, before Cook books became hot, Dugard had contracted with the Pocket Books unit of Simon & Schuster for a new biography on the British captain who explored the south Pacific and died a grizzly death at the hands of Hawaiian warriors in 1778.
Industry sources estimate Dugard received just under $100,000 for his tome. While losing in the category of big ticket advances, Dugard now plans to beat his rival in the race to publication.
Dugard, who is already going full steam ahead on his manuscript, says the bio will also blend some real-life adventure reporting tied to the present-day effort to raise Cook’s old ship “The Endeavor.” A sunken vessel believed to be Cook’s was recently located under 30 feet of water just outside the harbor in Newport, R.I.
Dugard hopes to hand in the completed manuscript to Senior Editor Jason Kaufman by next spring and to have a book on shelves by spring 2001.
Horwitz is just shoving off on his writing expedition. The book sold last week based on a proposal and isn’t due on shelves until spring 2002.
“At first I was annoyed to see there was another Captain Cook out there,” says Dugard, “but I’m competitive by nature. I won’t be coming out head to head with him, but I will still strive to write a better book.”
Dugard has experience in knockdown, drag-out book races, notes his agent, Scott Waxman. Dugard’s current book, “Knockdown” from Pocket Books, is one of five current or planned books on the tragic Sydney to Hobart, Australia, sailing race in December 1998, in which six people died.
*Joe Armstrong, a rainmaking ad sales vet, is going to be exiting Worth, Equity and Civilization magazines at the end of November. The magazines’ parent company, Capital Publishing, headed by Randy Jones, just rechristened itself Worth Media and plans to spend heavily on reinventing itself as a dot-com player rather than expanding through conventional ink-on-paper products.
“It’s a real smart move to follow these Internet opportunities, but I’m really a print guy – that’s where my heart is,” says Armstrong.
*Magazine and newspaper editors this week are expected to get their first look at the new Michael Gross book on the baby boom generation, to “My Generation: Fifty Years of Sex, Drugs, Rock, Revolution, Glamour, Greed, Valor, Faith and Silicon Chips,” due to be published by the Cliff Street imprint of HarperCollins next February. HarperCollins is owned by News Corp. which also owns the Post.
Gross sees his boomer book standing in stark contrast to NBC-TV anchor Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,” which extols the accomplishments of the World War II era.
“Brokaw’s book may be about the greatest generation, but my generation has the greatest stories,” claims Gross.
Industry sources say he interviews 19 people he calls “quintessential boomers” – everyone from Donald Trump to Mark Rudd, the ’60s radical, who is now a teacher in New Mexico. For contrast, he has Tim Scully, the chemist who made Orange Sunshine LSD and a Vietnam War silver medalist. He also has what he claims is Michael Fuchs’ first big interview since he was ousted from his HBO post at Time Warner.