Most of the people who came to Camilla Morton’s book party at the Diane von Furstenberg showroom last Thursday night appeared to be models or DJs or photographers. Giselle Bündchen arrived in skintight leather pants. A man with a waxed handlebar mustache wandered about wearing glasses. One young lady had on an American Apparel leotard and platform heels that resembled nothing so much as toaster ovens.

Thirty-seven-year-old publisher Carrie Kania, who recently put out the American edition of Ms. Morton’s best-selling style book, A Year in High Heels, looked with excitement at her author’s fashionable friends, but spoke only to her colleagues from Harper Perennial, the small but proud paperback unit of HarperCollins that she has lovingly presided over since the fall of 2005.  read more »

New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza finalized an agreement Monday with Vanessa Mobley of the Penguin Press to write a book about President-elect Barack Obama’s first year in office. Mr. Lizza’s contract, worth a sum in the mid-six-figures, was negotiated by his D.C.-based literary agent, Gail Ross. It is, to date, his second book deal, and everyone involved is hoping it goes better than the first one, which he cancelled during the summer of 2007 to focus on his day job.

The way he tells it, Mr. Lizza had a contract sitting in his drawer waiting to be signed when a phone call from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, moved him to tear it up.  read more »

Last week, a professor from Pennsylvania named Michael Lennon sold a book to Simon & Schuster about his old friend Norman Mailer. It’s a biography, this book—one that Mailer authorized Mr. Lennon to write before he died last November at the age of 84. Simon & Schuster is reportedly paying Mr. Lennon $800,000 for his efforts, which is evidently a more generous sum than what the flagship imprint of Random House, Mailer’s publisher since the mid-’80s, was willing to part with when Mr. Lennon’s agent, a lawyer who specializes in publishing law, put the biography before them. The lawyer, Boston-based John “Ike” Williams, took outside bids on the book upon receiving Random House’s initial offer, and ultimately went with the house that could pay his client the most money.  read more »

Steve Rubin would like everyone in book publishing to know that the 16 people who were laid off from Random House’s Doubleday division last week lost their jobs because he thought it had to be done, not because the new guy in corporate told him so.

Mr. Rubin, who at 66 has been the publisher of Doubleday off and on for the past 18 years, made sure this message rang out as soon as news of the cutbacks began to spread last Tuesday morning. The intended takeaway was that Mr. Rubin’s new boss, Random House CEO Markus Dohle, had had nothing to do with initiating the unpleasantness.  read more »

Michael Pietsch, Jamie Raab and Megan Tingley all dodged a bullet five years ago. For a moment there, it looked like their owners were going to sacrifice them, and the rest of the Time Warner Book Group, to Bertelsmann Inc., the German-based multimedia company that owns the largest publishing house in the world.

Mr. Pietsch, at least, could have expected to keep his job. Little, Brown & Co., the shop he’d been running for about two years, would have been a crown jewel for Bertelsmann, which is to say it was a big part of why the conglomerate wanted Time Warner’s publishing properties in the first place.  read more »

Mere weeks remain before the much-anticipated publication of Roberto Bolaño’s 912-page novel 2666. Andrew Wylie, the literary agent who was recruited by the late author’s widow last spring to take over the representation of the estate, is marking the occasion by flying to Barcelona next month to see what other work was left behind. Mr. Wylie said the papers in Bolaño’s residence have not yet been rigorously reviewed, but that he understands there is more material, including several short works of fiction and a collection of poetry, that publishers will see “in the course of time.” There are also two other works, one published in 2007 and the other in 2002, that have not yet been translated from Spanish into English.  read more »

A frost is coming to publishing. And while the much ballyhooed death of the industry this is not, the ecosystem to which our book makers are accustomed is about to be unmistakably disrupted. At hand is the twilight of an era most did not expect to miss, but will.

For now, the stifling timidity many editors and agents are predicting appears not to have taken hold. The Penguin Press just acquired a book about the history of American counterfeiters written by a recent college graduate who works at Lapham’s Quarterly. Literary agent Susan Golomb, who introduced Jonathan Franzen and Marisha Pessl to the world, is out with a manuscript for a novel by first-time author Tom Rachman, and interest from editors has been so energetic that she had trouble keeping up with the preempt offers.  read more »

Are the editors and agents who said it would be impossible to write or publish a worthwhile postgame recap of the 2008 election having second thoughts now that the race has turned out to be so much fun?

Michael Takiff, an oral historian preparing to go out with a proposal for precisely that kind of book, hopes they are.

His literary agent, young up-and-comer Jason Ashlock of the Marianne Strong Agency, describes Mr. Takiff’s book as a spiritual heir to the late Theodore White’s classic, The Making of the President, a novelistic ticktock that gave readers an inside look at the presidential race of 1960 and offered a level of detail that daily reporters didn’t have room for in their copy.  read more »

From the outside, it looked like a colossal failure of management: a case of crossed wires, perhaps, or the result of overpowering pressures combining with such force that the people in charge had no option but to do what they did.

What else could explain Susan Peterson Kennedy’s decision last week to allow three of the biggest imprints under her jurisdiction at Penguin Group USA to sign up books on the same exact topic in the span of just 48 hours?

That topic, of course, was the crisis on Wall Street—a crisis that apparently did not discourage Ms. Kennedy, Penguin’s president, from green-lighting an extraordinary shopping spree that left many in the industry scratching their heads and that is estimated to have cost the company more than $2 million.  read more »

Is it time yet to start pulling together books about last week’s catastrophe on Wall Street? Publishers are uneasy about making plans too soon, but the city’s finest financial journalists—and their literary agents—are eager to get moving.

“There are probably two dozen writers in search of a book, but if you don’t have an idea, you have to wait and watch and see how it unfolds,” said Tim Duggan, VP and executive editor at Harper who specializes in nonfiction. “Maybe there will be a story there in a couple months’ time, when the picture is clearer, but right now the financial climate has been changing dramatically every 24 hours, if not more, so what it will look like in three months’ time could be very, very different.  read more »