Headnote: This is a page intended primarily to be of use for those interested in the blog-book session coming up in the Saturday morning session. It’s as near as I can recover from the many, many versions of the proposal I used to sell my upcoming book to an American publisher — Harcourt as was, now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — and a British one, Faber & Faber.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a generalizable model, just an example of one approach that worked in the marketplace. As noted in the Wiki page for the session — to be moderated by David Munger and myself—besides the fact that this proposal worked, the other feature of note is that the book that evolved from this proposal differs from this ancestral form in key ways, while maintaining a clear connection to its origins.

Enough throat clearing. Here’s the document:

Newton and the Counterfeiter
A strange and fatal story of genius, crime and punishment

A book proposal by
Thomas Levenson

The End:

On March 22, 1699 an execution convoy set out from Newgate prison, bound for Tyburn, carrying half a dozen convicts on their final journey.

Some of the condemned men traveled in style. John Arthur, a famous highwayman, sat at ease in a coach. The mob cheered as he paused at public houses along the way, arriving at the gallows as drunk as he cared to be. William Chaloner enjoyed no such luxury.

The most notorious counterfeiter of his day, Chaloner once boasted that he had coined 30,000 guineas of false gold