The reading was at Edgewood College, where Vitek teaches English with a journalism concentration.

Nobody in the audience had heard of Pope.

That did not surprise Vitek. It's one of the reasons he felt it was important to write the new book, which is titled, "The Godfather of Tabloid: Generoso Pope Jr. and the National Enquirer."

"He has had," Vitek was saying Tuesday, "an influence on all our lives."

Pope is the man who first put a tabloid newspaper into a supermarket. He called it the National Enquirer and for a long time supermarket shoppers could not get enough of it.

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, the Enquirer's saturation coverage -- $300,000 spent on a Lear jet and helicopters for the reporting crew -- included someone secretly snapping a photo of Elvis in his casket.

The photo, on the Enquirer's front page, helped sell a record 6.7 million copies of the paper.

Tom Kuncl, the Enquirer's executive editor at the time, told Vitek the printing company ran out of paper for the Presley issue. "He was on the phone telling them to go to 8 million," Vitek said.

The front cover of the new book, published by the University of Kentucky Press, substitutes a photo of Generoso Pope into the Presley casket photo. It's the kind of tabloid touch Pope would have admired.

The book has received an unusual amount of attention for a university press title. Early interest from Borders led Kentucky to increase the print run, and Vitek told me he's pleased with the finished book and its early reception.

In Madison, enquiring minds may find themselves asking: Who is Jack Vitek?

Vitek, 68, came to Madison in 2002 to teach at Edgewood, having just earned his Ph.D. at Bowling Green University in Ohio. That's right, a doctorate degree in his 60s.

"It rejuvenated me," Vitek said.

Born in Washington, D.C., to a military family, Vitek moved often as a kid but landed his first of many newspaper jobs back in Washington, as a copy boy with the tabloid Washington Daily News. Within months he was a general assignment reporter, and he never looked back.

Vitek had stints at the Wall Street Journal and Newsday, and while working at the Palm Beach Post -- the National Enquirer's home turf -- he got a sense of the tabloid landscape, which, for all its excesses, had its charms.

Vitek recalled having drinks with Bill Graham, a Madisonian who became one of the Enquirer's top photographers. Vitek met others on the Enquirer's colorful reporting staff -- many of them English -- who never took a journalism ethics course but were also never out-hustled for a story.

Vitek even wound up writing a book with one of them, an unauthorized biography of the late actor Rock Hudson.

Always looming -- at least until his death in 1988 -- was the mysterious Generoso Pope, founder and driving force behind the National Enquirer.

"He had a kind of Mafia upbringing," Vitek said. "His instinct was to lay low."

Vitek took on Pope and the Enquirer for his popular culture dissertation at Bowling Green. That laid the groundwork for his book, which was originally contracted by the University of Wisconsin Press. A regime change there led Vitek to take the project to the University of Kentucky Press.

Pope's father had been a publisher, and after he died, Pope bought the New York Enquirer. It struggled in the early 1950s as a so-called legitimate paper, until the day -- legend has it -- when Pope passed an accident scene, saw a crowd gathered, and was struck with inspiration.

"If that's what they want," Pope is said to have declared, "that's what we'll give them."

I asked Vitek what "that" was.

"Gore and freaks," he said.

The paper grew through the 1960s -- one high (or low) point came with the publication of Lee Harvey Oswald's autopsy photos in 1963 -- but the real breakthrough came in 1971, when Pope managed to get the Enquirer into supermarkets and brought celebrities into the story mix.

For the next several years, circulation grew at the rate of one million per year, topping out close to six million.

By the time of Pope's death in 1988, circulation had dipped, and it would continue to decline as more outlets for tabloid fodder appeared.

Vitek concedes that even after all his research, Pope remained an enigma -- a tyrant with no close friends -- but the tabloid culture he spawned is with us every day.

Vitek's next project, a biography of William Holden, probably won't include anyone posing as a priest to get into Bing Crosby's funeral. An Enquirer reporter, Frank Zahour, told Vitek that story. Zahour had one scary moment at the funeral, when someone whispered his name.

Had he been found out?

It was another Enquirer reporter, posing as a caterer.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.