Dan Rattiner has made a career of finding offbeat stories amid the glitter of the Hamptons celebrity scene. Now the founder of Dan’s Papers, the weekly publication read by those who vacation on the East End, is getting ready to tell his own story.

Mr. Rattiner is set to publish his first memoir next spring. And while no book tour is yet set, he will likely be reading excerpts at places such as Book Hampton and doing television and radio interviews to get the word out.

The 67-year-old editor, reporter, and Hamptons fixture has for years shared his commentaries with readers and entertained them with the idiosyncratic stories (some true, some unabashedly made up) that fill Dan’s Papers.

He’s even written a number of other books, with topics ranging from divorce (“It’s All Her Fault” and “It’s All His Fault”) to losing weight (“The Eat All You Want and Still Lose Weight Cookbook”).

But his forthcoming book, which comes on the heels of the sale of Dan’s Papers for almost $20 million to an Ohio-based newspaper company, will be the first with a major publishing house. Harmony Books, which falls under the Random House umbrella, is set to release it in May 2008.

“It’s like ‘The Color of Water’ or ‘Waiting for Snow in Havana,'” Mr. Rattiner said. “It’s about my coming of age in the Hamptons. It’s about the paper’s coming of age and it’s about the Hamptons’ coming of age.”

Mr. Rattiner — who had a reporter meet him at his dentist’s office, where he was getting a tooth fixed — has a Rolodex many would envy. His “advisory board” includes a writer for the New Yorker, Ken Auletta; singer Billy Joel; publisher Mortimer Zuckerman; and other boldface names. When asked what the group does, he laughed and said it has never actually met but is made up of people he can call for input.

As Dan’s Papers covers the celebrity scene, Mr. Rattiner can hardly make a move in the Hamptons without being recognized. He has a thick white beard, wears a Crocodile Dundee-style hat, drives a 1959 red Triumph convertible, and writes stories from a beach chair with a three-pound computer perched on his lap.

Although his glossy weekly sold for more than $19 million last month, Mr. Rattiner actually sold his majority interest in the 1980s to News Communication Inc., which also owns the congressional newspaper the Hill. He declined to discuss the terms of this summer’s sale, other than to say he plans to remain at the paper’s helm.

The chairman of News Communications, Jerry Finkelstein, said he purchased the publication for $400,000 and that Mr. Rattiner received “a couple a million” dollars from this deal.

Mr. Finkelstein, 91, also predicted success for Mr. Rattiner’s soon-to-be-published book.

Yesterday, Mr. Rattiner said he had recently settled on a title, “In the Hamptons: My 50 Years With the Fisherman, Farmers, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.” Each of its chapters will focus on a Hamptons experience he has had or a person he has met, he said, including celebrities such as George Plimpton and President Clinton, who served as umpire in a Hamptons artists-writers softball game when he was governor of Arkansas.

As a college student, Mr. Rattiner worked for his father, who owned White’s Drug Store in Montauk. Itching to assert his independence, he decided he would break out on his own, but decided against opening another store in town because his father’s store sold everything from toiletries to appliances and he thought anything he could sell would compete.

Instead, he started up a free weekly paper. In the peaked-roof headquarters of Dan’s Papers in Bridgehampton, Mr. Rattiner pulled out the selling dummy he created for his first and still existing publication, the Montauk Pioneer.

Nearly five decades later, Dan’s Papers, which became his flagship publication, has a summer circulation of about 59,000, Mr. Rattiner said. A flip through the paper shows advertisements from almost every major business and real estate firm in the Hamptons.

Mr. Rattiner’s byline can be found on multiple stories in each issue, though he seems to be grooming a successor in one of his sons, David Lion Rattiner, who has been writing for the paper for the last several years. Still, Mr. Rattiner says he has no plans to retire: “I want to do this until I fall over.”