"I'd rather swallow a bag of hair."
Johnny Depp is starting is how own book imprint at publishing giant HarperCollins, the company announced.
The publisher said the Depp will seek to publish “authentic, outspoken and visionary ideas and voices.”
In a statement released by HarperCollins, Depp said, “We will do our best to deliver publications worthy of peoples’ time, of peoples’ concern, publications that might ordinarily never have breached the parapet.”
He already has two projects lined up, both seem in the spirit of Depp’s persona.
In January, Infintum Nihil will publish House of the Earth, a recently discovered novel by folk legend Woody Guthrie, which comes at the end of a year of celebrations for the centennial of his birth.
Guthrie, who died in 1967, completed the novel in 1947, but never published it. The manuscript was just discovered in the Guthrie archives.
Historian Douglas Brinkley (Cronkite, Wheels for the World) will collaborate with Depp on the editing of the book.
Brinkley will also pen Infintum Nihil’s second book for Depp, The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan, scheduled for publication in 2015.
Unraveled Tales springs off Brinkley’s recent Rolling Stone cover story on Dylan and “aims to set the record straight” on the music legend. It will be based, in part, on interviews Dylan did with Brinkley.
“Bob has been very warm and forthcoming with us,” Brinkley said in a statement. “His music has inspired us both deeply since we were teenagers.”
Beyond the first two projects, which feature hands-on input from Depp, the announcement did not sketch out Depp’s regular role at the imprint or how much time he expected to devote to publishing
Depp’s Infintum Nihil is the second big-name publishing announcement to come out of Hollywood in the last month, following on the news that Barry Diller and Scott Rudin were forming their own e-publishing venture with Atavist.
