Big Deal

Scribner has paid a rumored $1 million for a long-lost romantic novella set in the South Pacific penned by the late Margaret Mitchell in 1916, when she was only 16. Scribner persuaded the Mitchell estate to let them publish the 128-page work (and preempted an auction) by brandishing Mitchell's old Gone With the Wind contract, which gave Macmillan (now Scribner) first dibs on the author's next book, which she never wrote.