paper trail

Apr 30, 2013 @ 2:45:00 pm

The Beastie Boys in their younger days.

A.A. Milne: venerated British author, Winnie the Pooh creator, and, according to newly released British military documents, “reluctant wartime propagandist.”

What do Amanda Knox and Lawrence Wright have in common? Neither of their books will be published in England out of fear of the country’s rigorous libel laws. HarperCollins UK initially agreed to release the 25-year-old’s memoir, but recently backed out over concerns about a possible lawsuit and complications arising from Knox’s retrial in Italy over the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.

The two surviving members of the Beastie Boys have signed a deal with Spiegel & Grau to publish “a book celebrating their history and aesthetic” that’s slated to come out in 2015. The book—which doesn’t have a title yet—will be edited by journalist Sacha Jenkins, and “loosely structured as an oral history.” The Times adds that “it will also have contributions by other writers, as well as a strong visual component.”

Moby Lives catches a nice detail from Julia Hobsbawm’s remembrance of her father, celebrated English historian Eric Hobsbawm, in the Financial Times: “Earlier, as I was buying a small bunch of flowers to lay on the grave, I had an overwhelming sentimental urge to give my father one last thing to read: it seemed impossible that he would never breathe in ideas again. I bought the London Review of Books, which he had regularly contributed to in life and which featured, as it happened, his friend Karl Miller’s obituary of him. We laid the copy, fresh and folded, on top, and then the gravedigger finished his work.”

Macmillian has agreed to pay $26 million in a settlement over an e-book price-fixing case. Here’s how the money breaks down: “the final settlement includes $20 million for consumer compensation; $3 million to cover the costs of the 'investigation' and litigation; $2.475 million for plaintiff's attorneys' fees; and $1,000 for each of the named plaintiffs in the consumer class as a ‘service award.’”

In a moment of candor, media mogul Barry Diller told Bloomberg TV last week that he regretted buying Newsweek.