To say that there isn't anyone quite like the magazine baron responsible for Maxim (and thus, its many knockoffs) would be an understatement. But the Bookseller's Joel Rickett was caught seriously off-guard while interviewing the man in advance of his first book, HOW TO GET RICH, which Random House UK publishes at the end of next month. "You're obviously an intelligent person, so why are you a wage slave? Why are you making the owners of The Bookseller rich?" he says to Rickett. "I'm being facetious, but why people work for somebody else is a source of continual astonishment to me."

There are lots of reasons, and Dennis catalogues his failures, his excesses and and personal costs in his new book, which he pitches as an "anti self-help tome." "If you do all the things in this book, there's no question that you will become wealthy," Dennis says. "But this idiotic quest requires a great deal of self-sacrifice--and it isn't always you doing the sacrificing. I've produced no grandchildren for my mother because I was always too busy making more money than I could spend. It's pathetic. So this book is a road map that tells you at various stations the price you are about to pay."

Though if it were up to Dennis, he would have quit while he was ahead - making oh, about 40 million pounds or so - and stuck to poetry (as Ebury will publish his third collection, WHEN JACK SUED JILL, in November.)