When word leaked last week (in a Women’s Wear Daily report) that Steve Florio, the former longtime CEO of the Condé Nast magazine empire, was shopping a book proposal, “it set off a scrum in Manhattan publishing circles,” says David Carr in a New York Times report. Florio’s proposal, says Carr, was a “third-person self-hagiography that made the proposal a sort of instant classic. As Florio says in one passage, “I was not short on nerve or ego, and I carried a heavy chip on my shoulder. They’ll bury me with it, too. I was still Steve Florio. I was there to get the job done.” Says Carr, “In the proposal, the chip was plainly evident as he proceeded to eviscerate several former colleagues, including William Shawn, the former editor of The New Yorker, and Ronald A. Galotti, the former publisher of GQ and Talk and once one of his best friends.” As Steven Zeitchik reports in a Publishers Weekly report, “Almost immediately after [seeing the proposal], Crown’s Rick Horgan confirmed to PW that a deal had been signed.” But Florio tells the Times’ Carr that he was “horrified” by suggestions in the press that “he was writing a tell-all about his days of running Condé Nast.” He says someone else wrote the proposal for him and now, “Because of what was said and how it was taken, there will be no book.”