THE FIERCEST WAR in New York right now is not being fought over budgets, aid packages and votes, but rather over books. Mayor Edward I Koch has struck the first blow with Mayor, which has rocketed to number one on the New York Times list thanks to free publicity and some heavy leg work that took the shamelessly self-promoting Koch up and down the East Cast and to Europe. Koch's book will soon be joined by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's, who will soon provide the other side of his victory over Koch in the bitterly gubernatorial race. Sen. Alfonse M. D' Amato (R-N.Y.) promises a soon-to-be-released chronicle of his own peculiar rise to fame and power.

The Crimson spoke with Koch during his recent visit to Harvard, when the mayor addressed the Institute of Politics forum, led by former Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.'s study group, and made an imprompu sweep through Square book stores.

Ed Koch has little subtlety to him; he brings to a small gathering the same intensity that is a hallmark of his professional style and that jumps out from every page of his book.

Koch's trademark "How'm I doing?" springs from the mayor's lips like a reflex action, and the mayor attacks issues the same way Joan Rivers might attack a joke-"Can we talk?"

Koch on his newfound status as a national figure: "I'm just a small mayor from a town on the Hudson."

Koch on his failed bid for the governorship. "I recognize now what I should have recognized then: that being anything outside of New York City in any election position is not for me. I'm like a fish out of water. It showed my spirit at the time...I didn't convey to the organization that was supporting me the kind of zest for the mayoral."

Koch on being mayor: "I hope to be mayor for a long, long time. I sum it up by saying, 'forever.'"

Koch on his penchant for controversy: "I hope that it isn't that I enjoy controversy. I am feisty by nature; I am competitive; I like my work; I am not a punching bag. You put that all together, it spells Ed Koch."

Koch on his strained relations with the New York Black community: "I propose constantly to tell the facts. The facts are that, on every substantive matter, this administration is providing more to the Black community than was provided to them by earlier administrations."

Koch on telling New Yorker magazine in 1979, "I find the Black community very anti-Semitic." "I was summing up the Kerner Report in effect...It said we were heading towards greater racial division with Black anti white feeling and anti-Black feeling by whites I also pointed out, and intended to convey, that a number or Black leaders that I knew expressed themselves in an anti-semitic way. Now it seems to me that what Jesse Jackson recently did kind of makes the point doesn't it?"

Koch on race relations in New York. "I find that New York City probably has less racism and less divisiveness than other places in the United States. And I point to the fact that if you compare me with my predecessors, each of my three predecessors had rectal riots in the city of New York. Thank God we had no racial riots in New York in my administration. I'm knocking on wood of course. And then I point out that when they say [former Mayor John f.] Lindsay established a rolationship bringing whites and Blacks together. I point out that when he ran for reelection he got 42 percent of the vote and I got 75 percent of the vote. So just on the basis of that figure, you'd say I brought more people together than he did."

Before moving on, Koch, autographing a reporter's copy of Mayor, asks one more time, "How was I?"

"Fine, Ed. Fine."