-- WISE GUY Journalist A.J. Jacobs, who once spent 24 hours in a La-Z-Boy watching TV for EW, is setting off on a new assignment: He's planning to read all 33,000 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for a book he just sold to Rob Weisbach at Simon & Schuster called The Know-it-all: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Guy in the World. ''Thanks to my years at EW, I know which stars have fake boobs, which stars have toupees, and which have both.... But I know next to nothing about anything that happened before the invention of television,'' says Jacobs, now a senior editor at Esquire. Jacobs plans to spice up the narrative by trying out for Jeopardy! and crashing a Mensa convention.
-- A NEW UNDERTAKING The Sopranos had one; so did Sex and the City; and Oz has one coming out in January. So naturally Six Feet Under, another popular series from HBO (which has the same corporate parent, AOL Time Warner, as EW), wants to have a companion book too. According to insiders, Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, along with book packager Charles Melcher and a representative from HBO's licensing division, has made the rounds of publishers interested in celebrating that weirdly dysfunctional but somehow prototypical family, the Fishers, proud owners of the Fisher & Sons independent funeral parlor. ''All that I probably should say right now is we're going out to shop the book,'' says Melcher, president of Melcher Media, which also put together Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell. Meanwhile, perennial also-ran Showtime is getting a little tie-in action: Pocket Books has reached a deal to do three novels based on characters from the cable network's series Queer as Folk, to be followed by a companion book. ''[The show] doesn't only appeal to gay men,'' says Pocket associate publisher Liate Stehlik. ''A lot of women have said to me, 'It's like a great soap opera.'''
