Pele: The Autobiography
HEFTY TRIBUTE FIT FOR A SPORT'S KING 'Pelé' arrived for an interview strapped to a luggage cart and wheeled around by a publisher named Ovais Naqvi, who parked the parcel in a conference room. Naqvi stripped the tape from the carton to reveal 'Pelé',  the megabook, resting inside a silk-covered wooden box.  'Pelé: Edson Arantes do Nascimento' is a Soccer tribute to Pelé, the man who entranced Brazil and the world with his soccer artistry and incandescent personality. When praise for him expanded beyond comparisons to other mortals, his admirers likened him to Saturn, or God. Pelé himself has said that God sent him to earth to play soccer and compared himself to Beethoven.  So how better to celebrate the man at 66 than with a silk-swaddled tome of 720 pages that is 2 and three quarter inches thick, weighs 35 pounds and measures nearly 18 by 14 inches? It contains 1,700 images and 300,000 words by numerous sportswriters and interviews with some of Pelé s teammates between covers in the green and yellow of Brazil s national team. Pelé was paid a fee to sign each copy of the book and will receive royalties for providing autobiographical text. 'Other than Muhammad Ali, Pelé is the only other figure who has achieved the same international renown,' said Naqvi, the president and chief executive of Gloria, as he flipped through 'Pelé's glossy pages. Pelé's link to Ali goes beyond their global appeals. In early 2004, Taschen Books published 10,000 copies of 'GOAT: Greatest of All Time,' a 75-pound, 20-by-20-inch book that originally cost from $3,000 to $7,500 (because 1,000 books came with a bizarre porpoise sculpture by Jeff Koons). 'GOAT' has not yet sold out.  Naqvi served as an editorial consultant to 'GOAT' and said he understood how to produce industrial-strength luxury books that he believed would produce high profits.  'I felt there was an opportunity to create a business from scratch and to focus on particular subjects,' he said. He added, 'Coming fro --Richard Sandomir, New York Times, 18th Nov 06--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.