Paul Newman and A. E. Hotchner "Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good" Signed First Edition, Leather Bound Collector's Edition [Sealed]

Personally signed by Paul Newman, known as one of the finest actors of his time with films like 'Cool Hand Luke' and 'The Hustler. '

Personally signed by A.E. Hotchner, who wrote many television screenplays as well as noted biographies of Doris Day and Ernest Hemingway. He co-founded the charity food company Newman's Own with actor Paul Newman.

Easton Press, Norwalk, CT. 2004. Paul Newman and A. E. Hotchner. "Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good : The Madcap Business Adventure by the Truly Oddest Couple". Signed Limited Edition. Luxuriously boung with full genuine leather with 22kt gold accents.  A rare signed first edition, one of only 1,350 produced. Each one signed and numbered by both authors directly onto the limitation page. Number is unknown as the book is still sealed.

COA (Certificate of Authenticity) from Easton Press guarantees that the signature is genuine.

A great signed first edition for the discerning collector! 

PAUL NEWMAN (known as ol’ PL to both friends and enemies.)
The L stands for “Leonard” or “Lunkhead.” He answers to both. He is probably best known for his spectacularly successful food conglomerate. In addition to giving the profits to charity, he also ran Frank Sinatra out of the spaghetti sauce business. On the downside, the spaghetti sauce is out-grossing his films. He did graduate from Kenyon College magna cum lager and in the process begat a laundry business which was the only student-run enterprise on Main Street. Yale University later awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters for unknown reasons. He has won four Sports Car Club of America National Championships and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest driver (70) to win a professionally sanctioned race (24 Hours of Daytona, 1995). He is married to the best actress on the planet, was number 19 on Nixon’s enemy list, and purely by accident has 51 films and four Broadway plays. He is generally considered by professionals to be the worst fisherman on the East Coast.

A. E. HOTCHNER
fully intended to be a career lawyer but after two stultifying years practicing with a St. Louis law firm, he escaped into the wild blue yonder of the Air Force, vowing never to look at another Corpus Juris Secundum. After the war, Hotch became a literary bounty hunter, and in the process met Ernest Hemingway, with whom he buddied around for fourteen years, an adventurous period that Hotch chronicled in Papa Hemingway, which was published in 34 countries in 28 different languages. In between selling salad dressing, Hotch has written fifteen books, a dozen plays and musicals, and scores of television dramas. In 1999, Washington University conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters to go along with his doctor of law degree, but he is proudest of the fact that he was crowned marbles champion of St. Louis when he was in the sixth grade.

Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: The Madcap Business Adventure by the Truly Oddest Couple

“There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don’t know any of them.”

In 1978, Paul Newman and A. E. Hotchner decided that rather than just distribute Paul’s own salad dressing at Christmas to neighbors, they would offer it to a few local stores. Freewheeling, irreverent entrepreneurs, they conceived of their venture as a great way to poke fun at the mundane method of traditional marketing. Much to their surprise, the dressing was enthusiastically received. What had started as a lark quickly escalated into a full-fledged business, the first company to place all-natural foods in supermarkets. From salad dressing to spaghetti sauce, to popcorn and lemonade, Newman’s Own became a major player in the food business. The company’s profits were originally donated to medical research, education, and the environment, and eventually went to the creation of the eight Hole in the Wall Gang camps for children with serious illnesses.

In these pages Newman and Hotchner recount the picaresque saga of their own nonmanagement adventure. In alternating voices, playing off one another in classic “Odd Couple” style, they describe how they systematically disregarded the advice of experts and relied instead on instinct, imagination, and mostly luck. They write about how they hurdled obstacle after obstacle, share their hilarious misadventures, and reveal their offbeat solutions to conventional problems. Even their approach to charity is decidedly different: every year they give away all the company’s profits, empty the coffers, and start over again. The results of this amazing generosity are brought to life in heartwarming stories about the children at their camps.

With rare glimpses into their zany style and their compassion for those less fortunate, Newman and Hotchner have written the perfect nonmanagement book, at once playful, informative, and inspirational.

Features

Includes the classic Easton Press qualities:

* Premium Leather
* Silk Moire Endleaves
* Distinctive Cover Design
* Hubbed Spine, Accented in Real 22KT Gold
* Satin Ribbon Page Marker
* Gilded Page Edges
* Long-lasting, High Quality Acid-neutral Paper
* Smyth-sewn Pages for Strength and Durability
* Beautiful Illustrations

Additional Book Information

One of the most unusual philanthropic enterprises of the 20th century almost never happened: Newman's Own was the name intended for a restaurant the movie star wanted to open near his home in Westport, Conn. But the idea never went anywhere, freeing up Newman to start a business in the early 1980s with his friend Hotchner, a bestselling author (Papa Hemingway), selling a salad dressing made from Newman's personal recipe. The rest is history. As this breezy memoir recalls, the two broke every rule for launching a new food business, ignoring the failure rate for celebrity-themed products, demanding all-natural ingredients and bypassing nearly every aspect of market research (although they did hold one taste test at the home of local caterer Martha Stewart).

Despite all this, they managed to pull in nearly $1 million in profits their first year, all earmarked for charity, and have since launched many more products and donated nearly $140 million. This part of the story doesn't really have a lot of meat to it, but it is an entertaining string of anecdotes, song parodies and wacky customer letters. The book's second half becomes more somber as it shifts focus to the Hole in the Wall Gang, the organization they created to build and run camps for children with serious illnesses. The origins of each of the eight camps are recounted in detail, along with letters from some of the campers. A slew of appendixes, including several recipes utilizing Newman's Own products, rounds out the text.

Paul Newman

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Silver Bear, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, Newman showed an interest in theater as a child and at age 10 performed in a stage production of Saint George and the Dragon at the Cleveland Play House. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in drama and economics from Kenyon College in 1949. After touring with several summer stock companies including the Belfry Players, Newman attended the Yale School of Drama for a year before studying at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. His first starring Broadway role was in William Inge's Picnic, and he starred in smaller roles for a few more films before receiving widespread attention and acclaim for his performances in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).

Newman's major film roles include Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961), Hud Bannon in Hud (1963), Lew Harper in Harper (1966), Luke Jackson in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Judge Roy Bean in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Henry "Shaw" Gondorff in The Sting (1973), Doug Roberts in The Towering Inferno (1974), Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot (1977), Murphy in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), and as the voice of Doc Hudson in Cars (2006). He was nominated for ten Academy Awards, and won Best Actor for The Color of Money (1986).

Newman won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open-wheel IndyCar racing. He was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which he donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of May 2021, these donations have totaled over US$570 million. In 1988, Newman founded the SeriousFun Children's Network, a global family of summer camps and programs for children with a serious illness which has served 1.3 million children and family members since its inception. In 2006, Newman also co-founded Safe Water Network with John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Josh Weston, former chairman of ADP, to improve access to safe water to underserved communities around the world.

Newman was married twice and fathered six children. He was the husband of the actress Joanne Woodward.

A.E. Hotchner

Aaron Edward Hotchner (June 28, 1917 – February 15, 2020) was an American editor, novelist, playwright, and biographer. He wrote many television screenplays as well as noted biographies of Doris Day and Ernest Hemingway. He co-founded the charity food company Newman's Own with actor Paul Newman.

Hotchner was an editor, biographer, novelist and playwright. In 1948, he met Ernest Hemingway, and the two were close friends until Hemingway died in 1961. Hotchner wrote his biography of Hemingway, Papa Hemingway, in 1966. He wrote teleplays in the 1950s and 1960s adapting Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Killers, The Fifth Column, and After the Storm. Hotchner's biography of Doris Day, Doris Day: Her Own Story, was published in 1975.

The film King of the Hill (1993), directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a screen adaptation of Hotchner's 1973 autobiographical novel of the same name. A Depression-era, bildungsroman memoir, it tells the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis, after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis and his younger brother is sent to live with an uncle. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

Hotchner's play The White House starred Helen Hayes in a Broadway production staged at Henry Miller's Theater in 1964. Hayes played multiple First Ladies from United States history. It was performed at the White House itself in 1996. In 1993, Welcome to the Club, a musical comedy written with composer Cy Coleman, appeared on Broadway. In addition, Hotchner wrote A Short Happy Life, The Hemingway Hero, Exactly Like You (written with Coleman), and The World of Nick Adams.

Hotchner's play Sweet Prince was produced off-Broadway in 1982, at the Theater Off-Park, starring Keir Dullea and Ian Abercrombie.