A Treasure-Trove for King’s Admirers

The written and spoken legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. will be collected and distributed in various media formats, much of the material for the first time, under a large-scale agreement announced Wednesday by the King family and Time Warner.

The joint publishing deal calls for the release by Warner Books of “The Sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” and a posthumous autobiography of the slain civil rights leader to be drawn from his extensive writings and speeches. In addition, memoirs will be written by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and son, Dexter, chairman of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.

Besides the four books, audio recordings of King’s speeches, a CD-ROM on King and the civil rights movement and a King site on the World Wide Web will be made available by Time Warner. And its Book-of-the-Month Club will offer a boxed set of five books by King.

“This will make an extraordinary contribution to promoting my husband’s teachings,” Coretta King told a gathering at the Time & Life Building in Manhattan. “Now, Martin’s legacy will be disseminated widely throughout the world.”

The centerpiece of the agreement is the autobiography, scheduled for release in the fall of 1998, three decades after King’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn. The book is being prepared by Clayborne Carson, editor of the King Papers Project.

Carson said he was drawing from speeches, many of them long forgotten, and a vast archive of writings to produce a first-person account in King’s words--a technique used by writer Alex Haley when he worked on the autobiography of Malcolm X. As an example of how rare some of the source material is, Carson displayed the text of a letter that King sent to an acquaintance after the 1960 presidential election in which he attributed Richard M. Nixon’s defeat in part to the fact that the Republican was “a moral coward.”

Coretta King expressed happiness about the autobiography because, she said, the book’s use of “authoritative sources” would correct misunderstandings about her husband.

Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chief executive officer of Warner Books, declined to discuss financial terms, except to say it was a multimillion-dollar deal. Time Warner Chairman Gerald M. Levin called it “a distinctive relationship--I won’t even call it a transaction.”

The agreement with Time Warner was forged by Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entertainment and licensing firm that manages King’s estate and amassed the rights to all of the works involved.

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Thrilling New Year: The new year brings a bounty of thrillers from best-selling masters of the genre.

On Monday, the first installment of John Saul’s “The Blackstone Chronicles” went on sale from the Fawcett Crest division of Random House. Borrowing a recent idea from Stephen King (“The Green Mile”), who himself was indebted to Charles Dickens, Saul will spin out his latest tale of terror in six monthly segments.

The first $2.99 paperback, titled “An Eye for an Eye: The Doll,” runs 82 pages and sets up the small New Hampshire town of Blackstone, where the old asylum is about to be razed, unleashing very bad vibes in the process. (A visit to Blackstone on the Web, at https:// www.randomhouse.com / blackstone, takes a clicker inside the asylum, complete with a short history of lobotomies.)

First printing: a forest-clearing 2.3 million copies.

Today is the on-sale date for Richard North Patterson’s new legal thriller, “Silent Witness.” With “almost epic grandeur,” Publishers Weekly says, Patterson presents two homicide cases, 28 years apart, as a noted California criminal lawyer returns home to Ohio to defend an old friend charged in the sordid slaying of a 16-year-old mistress.

Knopf planned a first printing of 400,000.

Monday will bring Patricia Cornwell’s “Hornet’s Nest” from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The novel is a departure for Cornwell, who gives a rest to her popular forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, to write about two women police officials and a young newspaperman as they investigate serial killings in Charlotte, N.C. Early reviews in Publishers Weekly and Entertainment Weekly savaged the book, but as Putnam’s 750,000-copy printing reminds us, Cornwell’s following is huge.

In addition, Jan. 16 is the publication date of David Baldacci’s “Total Control.” A Washington lawyer seeks the truth about a plane crash in which her husband dies and later is named as a terrorist who caused the plane to go down. Warner Books has announced a 500,000 printing.

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Changing Positions: Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas has stepped down as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief after a decade in the position, succeeded by Assistant Managing Editor Ann McDaniel. The magazine says McDaniel, 41, though based in Washington, will commute to the main offices in New York and continue to serve as chief of correspondents around the world.

Thomas, 45, was the lead writer on Newsweek’s post-election issue in November, a retrospective that has been expanded to book length for publication later this month as “Back From the Dead: How Clinton Survived the Republican Revolution” (Grove / Atlantic). Thomas will continue to handle special projects and write weekly stories from Washington, such as this week’s cover story about Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit against President Clinton.

In reviewing the case, the piece ascribes greater credibility to Jones’ case than it may have previously received in the mainstream press. “The president’s best bet may be to do what he failed to do the day before the suit was filed: settle the case,” Thomas concludes. “It may require an apology, but the alternative seems worse.”

* Ink will return in two weeks. Paul Colford’s e-mail address is [email protected].