So here we are in the middle of a campaign race, and what is likely to be this week's most rousing topic at the water cooler? 1) Gee, I miss Bill Bradley. 2) Will Ralph Nader be allowed to debate? 3) Purple–and leather!–are back.

If you're Gary Cross, you chose 3). Why? Because he believes that consumerism is where Americans find common ground. Over the course of the 20th century, consumerism (which Mr. Cross defines as "the understanding of self in society through goods") has filled needs, salved wounds and, he argues, redefined the terms liberty and democracy . Why get involved in potentially humiliating personal discussions over the merits of the death penalty when it is so much easier to either stretch or affirm the boundaries of your socio-economic world by sprucing up your wardrobe with a little purple, a little leather? "In the context of consumerism," Mr. Cross writes, "liberty is not an abstract right to participate in public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing personal pleasure in and through goods. Democracy does not mean equal rights under the law or common access to the political process but, more concretely, sharing with others in personal ownership and use of particular commodities."

Mr. Cross sets himself apart from most historians, who understand history as a force driven by political ideas and power. Where they might say that liberalism won the century, he argues that consumerism did. They place consumption in the private sphere; he locates it in the public sphere: It provides, he writes, "a more dynamic and popular, while less destructive, ideology of public life than most political belief systems in the twentieth century."

Bad times, or merely loud times, like the Depression or the 60's, only make people want more stuff and galvanize the marketing industry. Modern consumption also "helped individuals contend with social conflict and ambiguity, evade clear-cut choices, and even hold contradictory desires." In other words, according to Mr. Cross, consumerism offers liberation without the attendant struggle.

Over five chapters covering 10 decades, Mr. Cross (the author of several other works, including Kid's Stuff: Toys and the Changing Worlds of American Childhood and Technology and American Society ) explains how this came to pass. This is drive-by history: He has in his sights a whole gang of social critics and policy wonks, including Jackson Lears ( Fables of Abundance ); "Frank Thomas"–Tom Frank to the rest of us ( The Conquest of Cool ); Lizabeth Cohen (her forthcoming A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America ); as well as James Twitchell, Barbara Ehrenreich and Robert Kuttner. If you have read these folks, you can skip An All-Consuming Century ; the thesis is worth pondering, but it gets worn down by some very dry and repetitive writing. The book's structure doesn't help, either. The arguments aren't framed as much as unloosed; the narrative unspools, slowly.

Mr. Cross begins his story at the turn of the century. First there was the shift from frontier values, from people defining themselves by their job skills and businesses to people defining themselves by their leisure activities and possessions. In a nutshell, 19th-century values pointed to responsibility, 20th-century values pointed to possibility. Immigrants, especially, embraced the possibility of lifting new identities from department store windows and movie screens.

Mr. Cross traces the development of leisure time: popular magazines, radio, television and the fantasy lives they kindled. Then he's on to McDonald's, drive-ins. Cars become both private enclaves and fashion statements, and life–"Things go better with Coke"– begins to go better with goods and services. From the "anarchic pleasures" of the plebeian crowds, we progress to the "aspirations and self-constraint of the genteel individual," and arrive finally at "experiencing common goods, entertainment, and fantasies in private," isolated together. Once upon a time, families went to church; then families stayed home to watch TV. Now you ride the subway and the person next to you is plugged into a Walkman. If you think this looks like creeping alienation, think again, says Mr. Cross. It's excitement. People are being expressive .

Who needs jeremiads from Thorstein Veblen (who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption") or Vance Packard (author of The Status Seekers )? Those killjoys didn't understand "how modern affluence transformed the meaning of desire and ultimately the role of individuality in advanced consumer society." The cultivated individual isn't threatened by mass consumption; the consuming crowds are never passive.

Well, I'm not convinced. And if Veblen and Packard had read Mr. Cross' book, I don't know that they would have understood the "meaning of desire" and the need for desire management any better. To do that, you need to discuss emotions, the senses, irrational behaviors. There's not much psychology here, though Mr. Cross does mention the word when he touches on the problem of class: "[A] community of shared values ... might have been a better choice than consumerism, but how many Americans had the psychological or social resources to pursue them? How could they, in a society still built on class and its humiliations?" For wage earners, consumerism picked up where insecurity left off and just kept on going.

Some in-depth analysis is in order here–and some context. For instance, in a section on consumer rights, we learn that in 1976, business interests began to perfect the art of lobbying Congress, and the advertising industry won a case in the Supreme Court, which recognized that ads could be protected speech. Two years later, a coalition of farm, grocery and independent businesses defeated a proposal for a federal consumer protection agency whose cornerstone would be regulating "commercial speech" directed at children. Too bad Mr. Cross didn't use this as a springboard to address how lobbying has become as influential as advertising, or how the role of the F.T.C.–not to mention the F.C.C.–has changed in the second part of the century.

And too bad Mr. Cross doesn't address the language of visual culture. As early as the 1930's, he writes, "advertisers assumed the language of high politics" with their claims to "serve" and liberate. Ultimately, "consumer goods became a language." Now consider the way politics has played out on television for the last 30 years, with the public relations industry waiting in the green room. There is a language at work, but it's not necessarily written or even oral. A democracy that allows membership without social interaction is governed by the eye. Instead of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, we get cameos on Oprah .

In the end, after critiquing the critics for offering no real alternatives to consumerism and concluding that, yes, consumerism was the winning ideology of 20th-century America, Mr. Cross offers no ideas for how matters might be improved in the 21st century. He writes, "[A] society that reduces everything to a market inevitably divides those who can buy from those who cannot, undermining any sense of collective responsibility and with it, democracy." He says we need to find a way around this problem, and one way is to use the backward glance. In other words: Here's my book, hope it helps.

Meanwhile, 250 pages of text and no mention of campaign finance reform? In An All-Consuming Century , you win some, you lose some.

Elizabeth Manus is a writer living in New York .

Suddenly, the conversational hum began to sputter. Someone famous was moving through the room. The agent looked up from dinner to see writer Salman Rushdie being led to his table. Mr. Rushdie's shy eyes sparkled through his wire-rimmed glasses and a subtle smile played on his thin lips. He was clearly enjoying the moment: the buzz of being a V.I.P. in a hot restaurant in the hottest city in the world.

For most New Yorkers, a celebrity's presence in a restaurant is considered an enhancement of the dining experience, a perquisite of our metropolitan lives and an affirmation of our extracurricular tastes.

At the very least, it is fodder for conversation, and as Mr. Rushdie passed through the dining room, table talk, in some cases, turned to the spate of tabloid items that had been written about the author in recent weeks. Did you hear that Rushdie was in love again? With a model and cookbook writer! He's moving to New York! He's had some work done! What happened to the last wife? Trivial stuff, yes, but life-affirming in a distinctly New York way.

But there was a much different vibe emanating from the agent's table. "I was so pissed to be in the restaurant with him," the agent, who requested anonymity, told The Observer . "I'm going to be mad, and dead." The agent added that everyone at her table agreed. "We can't enjoy our meal. We don't want to die because of his fatwa . It's so passive-aggressive toward people in Manhattan," the agent continued. "We have enough trouble here."

If New York is a place where life and death can stand on the same street corner, then Mr. Rushdie is the quintessential New Yorker. He lives with the exponentially heightened sense we all live with in this city: That our quests to make some kind of mark on the world can be ended instantly-by crazed gunman or by taxi-and with no chance to protest.

Marking the 10th anniversary of the fatwa that put a price on his head for his authorship of The Satanic Verses , Mr. Rushdie wrote in the Feb. 15, 1999 issue of The New Yorker that the psychological damage done by the death sentence was "a spear in the stomach which somehow doesn't kill but turns and twists." Still, Mr. Rushdie declared in The New Yorker , "I'll go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams."

Mr. Rushdie's apparent decision to "go on" in New York, with a high-profile model girlfriend, has spawned a number of questions and interpretations among Manhattan's media elite, who, given the author's penchant for social hotspots, are feeling a tad unsettled since Mr. Rushdie came to town.

These literary and social types wonder whether Mr. Rushdie will be using security, and who will be paying for it.

And, quite frankly, they-especially the publishing types-can't help speculating about his motives for coming to New York. ("Because New York has the best trim in the Western world," said one editor.)

Certainly one reason for Mr. Rushdie's increased presence here is a beautiful young woman with a Star Wars -worthy name: Padma Lakshmi. The two met last August at the Talk magazine launch party on Liberty Island. Mr. Rushdie, 53, is not the first older man in Ms. Lakshmi's life. The 29-year-old Ford model and actress, a Tamil Hindu Brahmin from South India, also has dated Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon. She has hosted an Italian talk show wearing a bikini, speaks five languages and wrote a cookbook called Easy Exotic: A Model's Low-Fat Recipes From Around the World that Miramax Books published.

Ms. Lakshmi entered Mr. Rushdie's life barely three years after he married Elizabeth West, a former literary assistant with the British publisher Bloomsbury, at a quiet but much-covered Labor Day weekend ceremony in East Hampton. Mr. Rushdie has a son named Milan by Ms. West. He also has one by his late first wife, Clarissa Luard. In between Ms. Luard and Ms. West, Mr. Rushdie married the author Marianne Wiggins in 1987. When they divorced in 1993, she was quoted saying: "All of those who love him wish that the man had been as great as the event." Mr. Rushdie also once dated model Marie Helvin, a close friend of Mick Jagger's ex-wife Jerry Hall.

Of Ms. Lakshmi, one editor said: "She's totally enamored [of Rushdie]. She's adorable, sexy, very beautiful. She's not dumb. She's got a career going now. She's got these TV programs she's developing for the Food Channel."

Ms. Lakshmi gave up her New York apartment in 1999 and is based in Los Angeles and Milan. When Mr. Rushdie stays in New York, she stays with him.

Homeless in New York

But the backdrop for Mr. Rushdie's heartwarming midlife love story is menace and danger. The Iranian government in 1998 officially distanced itself from the fatwa -or bounty-that the Ayatollah Khomeini put on Mr. Rushdie's head nine years earlier for blasphemy against Islam. But conservative fundamentalist organizations continue to offer rewards of up to $3 million for the author's life.

Meanwhile, since 1989, Viking's New York offices received four bomb threats. Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks refused to display The Satanic Verses in their windows. In London, people burned copies of the book. At least 19 people died in protests and riots in India and Pakistan. The book's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed. Its Norwegian publisher was shot and wounded. Its Italian publisher was knifed.

As a result, Mr. Rushdie's New York adventure has not been all fun and games. For one, word in literary circles is that Mr. Rushdie has had to set his sights on living quarters outside the city because he had trouble finding a place in Manhattan that would take him.

"Three months ago, he was looking at a condo downtown, and they told him, 'You are not welcome here, we'd have to change our security system,'" said one publishing source. "I mean, can you imagine hearing that Salman Rushdie is moving into your building? Give me Sante Kimes any day. At least you know what you're in for."

When Mr. Rushdie first went into hiding in the U.K., he was guarded by top-level security reserved for prime ministers and royalty. After several years, the security was downgraded and Mr. Rushdie began chipping in for the bodyguards, but the tab to date for British taxpayers is some $23 million.

Now that Mr. Rushdie is in town, it's unclear what kind of protection, if any, New York City will offer. "Usually there's an assessment done, and the wishes of the subject is taken into consideration," said Detective Joseph Pentangelo of the New York Police Department press office. He would say no more. "The intelligence division doesn't want to talk about any kind of strategy. They feel discussing strategies would compromise the same strategies."

Will the police department be involved at all? "It's not a given," Mr. Pentangelo said. It's unclear whether Mr. Rushdie even ranks as a liability in the eyes of New York's Finest. "I can't say what kind of a threat he poses, if any," the detective said.

Another N.Y.P.D. spokesman, Detective Walter Burnes, told The Observer "there are some phases of [Mr. Rushdie's] movement that we may be called upon to handle and there are others that might be handled by the State Department. It depends on the circumstances."

If the Federal government is involved in Mr. Rushdie's safety, it's not saying.

"We've not been asked to protect him by anybody, so we really don't have a role in this," said Andy Laine, spokesman for the U.S. State Department's diplomatic security service.

A State Department official who requested anonymity said that Mr. Rushdie "hasn't come across our radar screen. It was an issue when there was a death threat against him, but now he's back to Joe Blow, ordinary citizen. Or as much as anyone in his position can be." The official added that the State Department could flag New York as a "sensitive" location if it's aware that Mr. Rushdie is visiting. The official said, however, that during the time of the fatwa , "it wasn't a case of what we did with Salman Rushdie per se, but [a case of] making clear that threatening to assassinate a writer on the basis of his views is a violation of international norms."

"Could some fundamental Muslim group still have a feeling that it's a mandate from God? Yeah," said Stephen Davis, a managing director for the international investigative security and consulting firm DSFX, and a former captain with 21 years in the N.Y.P.D. "You're dealing with people who have some deep fundamental beliefs, and they are the worst type of terrorists one could encounter," said Mr. Davis, although he opined: "If anyone was going to go after him, it would not be an organized effort. It would be some zealot, a less sophisticated threat-something in public rather than blowing up a building where he's going to be."

If Mr. Davis had to compare Mr. Rushdie's plight to anyone, he said it would be mob turncoat Sammy (The Bull) Gravano. He also estimated that protection could cost Mr. Rushdie $1,500 a day per bodyguard.

New Yorker at Heart

But New York apparently has a special allure for Mr. Rushdie, and he does not lack for friends here-among them, Alfred A. Knopf editor in chief Sonny Mehta, author Paul Auster, expat author Patrick McGrath and New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. Martin Amis figures in as well, according to one editor. "They like to move around together," he said, adding: "Why do British people of any sort move to New York? They can pal around with and insulate themselves from much impact at all with the colonials."

When they weren't behaving like bodyguards (none of Mr. Rushdie's friends would agree to put The Observer in contact with the author), Mr. Rushdie's pals contended that he's had his eyes on our island for some time. "You can tell it from his last novel," said his British expatriate pal, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens. "It's been a particular ambition of his to move to New York. He's always been a potential American most of his writing life," Mr. Hitchens told The Observer . "He yearns for the United States. In America there's room to spread his wings a bit. He always got more sympathy here."

"It's the difference between being stuck in a remote foggy island off the northwest coast of Europe in A.D. 50 and being in Rome," said author Ian McEwan, by phone from London. "New York is probably the most fascinating of all the cities in the U.S.A. Everything there is more lovable and horrifying. Everything runs in extremes."

"There's something about that huggy, kissy, fuzzily drunken darling, everybody-knows-everybody-else life in London that's unending," said the New Yorker's Mr. Buford, a friend of Mr. Rushdie's for more than 20 years. "It's hard to achieve privacy there. One thing America affords its writers bountifully is privacy, some would say neglect."

Yet those with a more jaundiced view of things would contend that Mr. Rushdie has come to New York not to disappear, but rather to extend the crescendo of his literary career.

When The Satanic Verses was published, Mr. Rushdie's publisher forecast 30,000 copies worth of hardcover sales. The fatwa turned that figure into 700,000 copies. Mr. Rushdie's critical successes, such as his Booker Prize-winning 1981 novel Midnight's Children and his 1983 novel Shame , each sold approximately 8,000 copies in hardcover.

Mr. Rushdie followed up Verses in 1995 with The Moor's Last Sigh which, cheered on by a rave review from The New York Times ' book critic Michiko Kakutani, sold some 60,000 copies. Mr. Rushdie's most recent work, The Ground Beneath Her Feet , which garnered mixed reviews, sold about the same. (Mr. Rushdie's next book is a novel called Repentance , about a man murdered in error.)

If sales of Mr. Rushdie's more recent novels have ebbed, his advances have crested ever higher. It's helped that one of his best friends is literary agent Andrew Wylie. For Ground and three reprinted novels, Mr. Wylie squeezed a little more than $2 million from Henry Holt. Then he shuttled the author over to Random House Trade Group for a five-book English world rights deal-four novels and an essay collection-worth more than a million dollars.

Mr. Wylie was instrumental in ratcheting up the net-worth statement of another talented British writer, Martin Amis. And Mr. Wylie's involvement in Mr. Amis' career came around the time that Mr. Amis left his wife Antonia, took up with a beautiful and exotic writer named Isabel Fonseca, got his teeth fixed and moved to New York.

Mr. Rushdie, however, appears to be making his move at a time when clubby London may have wearied of his presence. In a story about his newfound love for New York, London Times reporter Damian Whitworth wrote: "Rushdie, with the fatwa hanging over him, was sometimes criticized as arrogant for supposedly putting other people's lives at risk by appearing in public. There was chuntering, too, about his regular appearance at parties where he could be seen enjoying himself and indulging in famously exuberant dancing."

Right now, the New York press is devouring Mr. Rushdie's socializing; his nights on the town at Pastis or Tabla or the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, or the possibility, as Neal Travis reported in the New York Post , that the author may be considering an acting career. That's why the reporters and the photographers at this year's PEN Literary Gala April 10 at The New York State Theater all seemed to have one question. "Is Rushdie coming?" He never did.

Those who devour as code the gossip columns divining that Mr. Rushdie wants New York, and by extension, the U.S. market, to pay attention. When Mr. Amis did that, some here rolled their eyes. In Mr. Rushdie's case, they are looking over their shoulders. As one literary agent put: "None of us think it's going to be a lone gunman's bullet. It's going to be the World Trade Center all over again."

Yet keeping Mr. Rushdie safe seems to be less of a high-maintenance job these days. One British publisher who came through town in March recalled a dinner party four years ago. "Two officers came a few days before it, checked over the guest list, and asked where we would be seating him," said the publisher. "On the night of the dinner party, everyone had to arrive at a certain time. There was one policeman in a back room, and two outside in a car. Once the guests arrived, the police phoned Salman and we waited for him to arrive."

At a dinner New Yorker editor Tina Brown threw in New York in 1996, guests were asked to give their social security numbers in advance. When David Remnick threw a dinner to celebrate the publication of The Ground Beneath Her Feet in 1999, the location of the restaurant was kept secret until the day before the party.

But at the 1999 PEN Literary Gala, Mr. Rushdie appeared to just show up at Cipriani 42nd Street, even though raucous picketing outside by a local restaurant union could have been deemed a security risk.

Listening to the trials and tribulations of Mr. Rushdie in New York, Mr. Davis-who takes his security quite seriously-remarked, "I wouldn't be surprised if this were a clever promotional ploy...He realizes that if he's going to write another book, he's going to need exposure. Part of being a successful author is making appearances and pushing your book."

Part of being a successful writer, however, is to keep on living, and not in the narrow sense of the word.

In a piece on Elián Gonzalez for The New York Times Syndicate, Mr. Rushdie noted that the 6-year-old "has become a political football and-take the word of someone who knows what that's like-the first consequence of becoming a football is that you cease to be thought of as a living, feeling human being. A football is inanimate, and its purpose is to be kicked around."

The text in question appears on page 125. Ms. Adler mentions a book by the Watergate judge that she might review. "In the course of research, I had found that, contrary to what he wrote, and contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime. I did not review the book."

"I would defy Ms. Adler to produce any evidence whatsoever to support her contention that my father was a 'corrupt, incompetent and dishonest figure,' or that he had 'clear ties to organized crime,'" reads Mr. Sirica's letter.

Mr. Sirica, 46, a longtime reporter who now is a special projects writer at Newsday , calls Ms. Adler's assertions "irresponsible and malicious." He first saw the book on Feb. 10.

In a telephone interview, he said, "I know the libel laws well enough to know that's in there because he's dead, but it's a disgrace. In this business, it's often wise to let something go, because it becomes a bigger issue. I can't let it go. It's portrayed as factual. You would think the lawyers would have vetted this more."

Mr. Korda was out of the office, and according to his assistant Rebecca Head, had not yet seen the fax by press time.

IF YOU BELONGED TO ONE of the biggest writers groups in America, would you trust Amazon.com Inc. to help screen entries for a literary award with your group's stamp on it? If you're PEN American Center, you would. On. Feb. 8, Amazon.com announced the launch of the PEN-Amazon.com Short Story Award. The winner gets $10,000 and publication on Amazon.com and in The Boston Book Review .

"Amazon.com editors will screen the stories we anticipate receiving, and will present the final judging panel with a short list of about 20," said Nicholas H. Allison, editor in chief of the division called Amazon.com Book Store.

The PEN writers Jamaica Kincaid ( Autobiography of My Mother ), David Guterson ( Snow Falling on Cedars ) and Sherman Alexie ( The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven ) make up the judging panel this year. "They will pick a winner," Mr. Allison said.

The new outside sponsor will be contributing $10,000 toward the expenses of the awards and the overall expenses of PEN American Center. This will come in handy; support for general operating expenses are difficult to come by in the nonprofit world.

And whose idea was it? "The short story contest originated with Amazon, but has definitely been developed in a collaborative way with PEN," Mr. Allison said. The new award, one of 16 literary prizes offered by the 2,700-member-strong organization, will help PEN cross-pollinate its brand name.

And keep Amazon.com's bookish features in fine fettle. "If you look at the history of bookselling, Scribner's was a bookseller and published Fitzgerald and Hemingway," said Boston Book Review president Kiril Stefan Alexandrov. "Amazon could follow that kind of pathway, be some kind of funder and publisher of new writing. There's certainly no reason why it shouldn't take more of a publisher's role, a legitimizing agent role for writers."

PEN American Center is part of the international group PEN, which stands for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. The organization is known for its dedication to free expression. Asked if Amazon.com is aligned with that mission, PEN executive director Michael Roberts said, "I understand this award supports their desire to support the advancement of literature."

According to spokesman Kay Dangaard, Amazon.com's mission statement is: "We want to be the place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy on line."

At least one PEN member was pleased by the announcement. "It sounds like excellent news," said writer Cynthia Ozick, "to give publication and notice and cash to a writer who hasn't been noticed. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon.com has no existence. It's a chimera. Yes, I hear it all the time, and we're surrounded by waves of verbal dot-com, but it's an ocean in which I've chosen not to row my boat. I think when they started up they put a notice in The Times and wished me a happy birthday, so how could I have anything but the most benevolent feelings toward Amazon.com? I suppose the commercialization [of a literary prize] could be something, but the main thing is the boost that is given to a young or unknown writer; that overcomes everything. Maybe if the devil were behind it, it would be a good thing. It's not genetically engineered tomatoes, and I don't think it's a pollution of natural resources, either. It's just America doing its thing with goodwill and corporate backing."

IS A.O. SCOTT GETTING TIRED of sitting in the dark? Six weeks into a new job as film critic at The New York Times , Mr. Scott is already busy at work on a book proposal for Sanford J. Greenburger Associates agent Elyse Cheney.

"It's at the conceptualization stage," said Mr. Scott, who will also be writing for the Times magazine and the Times book review.

"The project is a very long-term endeavor and nothing that is coming out any time soon," Ms. Cheney said. "It will be a historical narrative based on key literary figures. The essence of the book is: What is an American classic?"

Wait: Haven't we heard this before? This is a fine time to be invoking T.S. Eliot's 1944 essay, "What Is a Classic?" Indeed, Andrew Delbanco, Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino have dilated upon this question in, respectively, Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997), How to Read and Why (coming in June from Scribner), and Why Read the Classics? (1999).

"I don't think Delbanco or Bloom are wrong, but I think one of the things that putting this in historical perspective might suggest is that what gets remembered is the product of always very complicated and specific histories," Ms. Scott said from his chair at 229 West 43rd Street. "One example is Melville. When Melville wrote Moby- Dick , it destroyed his career, and he dropped off the radar screen." He went on. "This book is attempting to participate in a conversation that they've [Mr. Delbanco and Mr. Bloom] advanced. I'm interested in how the literary culture got where it is today, the enshrining of personal experience, of the primary experience, the boom in memoirs. There's a tendency to be suspicious of anything that can't be verified."

And so Mr. Scott is paddling along the current Zeitgeist . In more ways than one, because mainstream trade publishing houses are also asking, "What is a classic?" And the answer goes something like: "A book that doesn't demand a new advance."

New York's biggest houses are putting a lot of muscle into repackaging the old books–in publishing parlance, the backlist–and gussying them up in new clothes. Sometimes there are new bells and whistles (photographs, author biographies, what have you).

Between 1991 and 1999, the Knopf Publishing Group, Scribner, Doubleday, Harper Collins, Penguin and the Modern Library all launched or relaunched classics lines.

"Publishers are seeing that they already own books that can work with retooling, repackaging," said one publishing executive. "If you throw on a nicely designed new cover … You don't have to pay an advance. You don't want to just do front-list publishing, or you'll die. Publishers are under pressure to increase their revenue every year."

Mr. Scott does not have to be concerned just yet about that kind of pressure. He'll be mulling the academic question as he tromps off to the movies. "The one thing I'm shocked about is that at press screenings there's no popcorn and they don't show any trailers. That's how I know it's a job."

WHEN IT COMES TO CHOOSING a suitable publisher, an author usually wants either money or love, but in a large, single-book deal on Jan. 31, an author chose the house of W.W. Norton on the rather unusual basis of company ownership.

"It was one of the reasons, and a significant reason," said Nicole Aragi, of Watkins-Loomis Agency.

Three publishers made it to the final round of bidding for a first novel called The Death of Vishnu , by Manil Suri, but Mr. Suri remained unimpressed even by Harper Collins' best bid of $405,000, going instead with Norton's $350,000 offer.

Mr. Suri likely reasoned that because Norton is an employee-owned company, his book will not be subject to the kind of tremors–in particular, the stampede of departing editors–that regularly rattle the mainstream publishers. Most of those are owned by publicly traded media conglomerates. If Norton's people are betting its own money, goes the argument, they will be that much more invested in an author's success.

The book is the first volume of a planned trilogy about the Trimurti, the three main gods in Hindu mythology. Still to come: the life of Siva and the birth of Brahma.

For Norton, it was also a first: The amount was the highest the house has ever paid for a first novel.

Where did Mr. Suri learn such attention to principle? Possibly the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where the 40-year-old author teaches numerical analysis.

So far, the literary life has been good to Mr. Suri. Days before he settled upon a home, he stopped into The New Yorker 's offices to discuss changes on an excerpt from the as-then-unsold novel. The story, "The Seven Circles," appears in the Feb. 14 issue. Norton plans to publish the book in January 2001.

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux president and founder Roger Straus has written to Norton editor in chief Starling Lawrence on Ms. Sontag's behalf, to express concern about the contents of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon , by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, to be published in June.

"She has a history of suppressing, or attempting to suppress, any unauthorized media notices about her," said Ms. Paddock of Ms. Sontag's pre-emptive strike against the biography. "She doesn't want the hydraulics to show."

"I think it's about being a powerhouse in New York City," said Mr. Rollyson, who has written biographies of Martha Gellhorn and Rebecca West.

The irony, of course, is that Ms. Sontag is a past president of PEN and a member of its board of trustees, making her a symbol of free speech worldwide.

The dust-up began on Dec. 6, when agent Elizabeth Frost-Knappman, of New England Publishing Associates, sent out a letter to 15 periodicals inviting them to consider first serial rights for Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon . The idea was for the excerpt to coincide with the publication of Ms. Sontag's latest novel, In America , which Farrar will publish in March.

Nothing odd there, except that one of the editors who received the letter was Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Times Book Review . It is common knowledge in the New York literary world that Mr. Wasserman has been friends with Ms. Sontag for some 30 years. Ms. Frost-Knappman, who works in Chester, Conn., did not know.

Ms. Frost-Knappman was peddling a book that referred to Ms. Sontag, author of such works as On Photography and Illness as Metaphor , as "the Sybil of Manhattan" and "the Kenny G. of literature … The authors write of Sontag's public persona and private passions, including her open love of women, strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame, her political triumphs and missteps. Above all, they show how the life of Susan Sontag reveals the making of an icon," read the letter.

Mr. Wasserman faxed the letter to Ms. Sontag. Ms. Sontag informed Mr. Straus and First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus. On Dec. 14, Mr. Straus sent a letter to Mr. Lawrence stating that the pitch letter "leads all of us to believe that W.W. Norton & Co. is about to publish a scandalous and shocking account of her [Ms. Sontag's] life." The letter went on to say, "Let me also say that it is still hard for me to believe that a distinguished house such as W.W. Norton would be peddling the kind of biography that this confidentiality agreement and the covering letter suggests."

Mr. Garbus then faxed the agent on Dec. 17, requesting a copy of the twice-vetted manuscript. "As I told you, it gives me concern, for I understand it violates the privacy rights of third parties," Mr. Garbus wrote. He was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

A few days after Ms. Frost-Knappman heard from Mr. Garbus, she heard from the biographers' editor at Norton. "Alane [Mason] called and passed along a message from the publishing brass: 'Would you stop circulating manuscripts until we have a chance to review things?'" That was three weeks ago, and she has not yet heard from them, she said.

Meanwhile, six publications–including Vanity Fair, Talk , the Atlantic Monthly , and Mirabella –signed the confidentiality agreement. Talk and Mirabella have the full manuscript, and the others have at least one chapter.

Despite Ms. Frost-Knappman's provocative cover letter, publishing sources contend the book is a rather academic look at Ms. Sontag's life, which is to say: dry. Ms. Paddock, however, said Ms. Sontag's reaction has been par for the course.

"She has been marvelously successful at working all the angles," Ms. Paddock said. "I don't mean it to be pejorative, I mean it strictly in a political sense. She's managed to appeal to both high and low culture, she's written the definitive essay on pornography, on science fiction, she's movie critic ne plus ultra ; and yet she wrote this romance which was a best seller. She's written on people who were marginal and she gets to be in Zelig ." And yet, said Ms. Paddock, "I'm sure she'd deny with her dying breath that she's had a 'career.'"

Ms. Sontag declined to comment.

Pat Conroy has redefined the meaning of the word "blurb." Back in September, Alfred A. Knopf editor Jonathan Segal sent the author galley proofs of In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel, and a Changing America , by New York Times reporter Catherine S. Manegold in the hope of receiving a few kind words for the dust jacket. Instead he received a 2,515-word missive that eventually wound up in the January issue of Atlanta magazine. Turns out one of Mr. Conroy's friends–he had faxed it to three or four–had faxed it along to the monthly.

Mr. Conroy's absence from the book is at the heart of his complaint. "I was surprised that you sent me a copy of the book, Mr. Segal, since I could find no evidence in the book that I even attended the Citadel or played an active and vital role in the entire Shannon Faulkner passion play," Mr. Conroy wrote.

Ms. Manegold said she had twice tried to contact the author of The Lords of Discipline , and Mr. Conroy had not responded. That's possible, Mr. Conroy conceded. He said he went through his telephone records and his correspondence and could find no record, but "This doesn't mean she didn't try to contact me," he said.

Mr. Conroy's absence, however, may have more to do with the substance of the book, and conflicting interpretations of just what that is. To Ms. Manegold, "The focus of the book is about a history of abuse of young men. It took the interjection of women onto the campus to galvanize men to make their concerns public. How sad it wasn't addressed for all those years. I think you can teach discipline and order–and obedience even–without abuse. If you look at World War II, you have kids who went from their kitchens and men from offices and they fought honorably and well. We've lost our way in feeling we need to duplicate a war zone in a training field. Only 18 percent of these kids are going for military careers. What are you putting human beings into? To me that's the central driving thing of this."

"It's not a tick-tock of the Faulkner case," Ms. Manegold added.

Her book's dust jacket, however, suggests otherwise. Witness the book's subtitle and the photograph on the back cover of Ms. Faulkner, the young woman who broke the gender barrier at the Citadel.

Mr. Conroy, too, has his thoughts about what Ms. Manegold's book should be. And if it is Ms. Faulkner's tale, Mr. Conroy argues that he earned his place in it.

"She wrote me out of the history of Shannon Faulkner because I was a white Southern male and Citadel graduate who fought with every fiber of his being for women to come to my school. Ms. Manegold is guilty of bad history, bad journalism and, I think, very bad and shortsighted feminism," Mr. Conroy wrote in his letter.

Mr. Conroy charged Ms. Manegold with being "too rigid a feminist" to see that Ms. Faulkner's admittance to the Citadel was a triumph, not a defeat. "A feminist cannot understand or fathom or translate the Citadel," Mr. Conroy wrote. "In her loathing of the Citadel culture, she cannot bring herself to admit that anything good or worthwhile or exemplary can spring out of such an offensive and male-dominated crucible."

Readers will notice that the book's index has 40 subheads under "hazing at the Citadel." It has no entry for Pat Conroy.

Mr. Conroy was not pleased. "How do you examine the entire environment of the Citadel without talking to me?" Mr. Conroy told The Observer . "I've been the leading critic of the Citadel for the last 30 years." He compared that number to the four and a half years Ms. Manegold spent working on her book.

Mr. Conroy even got huffy at the publisher. "It is not only a bad book; it is a shameful one, and to think it is being published by the fabulous house of Knopf," he writes.

"Listen, free country, free opinions," said Mr. Segal.

James Salter has four books to his name, but when he turns in the next one, will it be his fifth? Mr. Salter is revising his second novel, The Arm of Flesh , about the tale of a fighter squadron in the Rhineland in 1955. The new book is called Cassada , after the book's young pilot. It will be published this year by Counterpoint Press.

"The big problem is whether to call this a new book or the same book," said Mr. Salter, from his home in Bridgehampton, L.I. "I haven't worked that out yet."

The 1961 jacket copy reads: "The book moving at the same time through present and past, wielding large fragments in a strange, almost independent way, is first opaque, becomes translucent, and then, with increasing swiftness, powerful and clear."

Apparently, Mr. Salter himself was unconvinced. "It's told in many voices, and they're not identified carefully. So I've eliminated four or five characters and strengthened others. The themes of the book is that sometimes it's the best as well as the worst who don't survive, and there's a reason for that. Also that doing the right thing, being good, isn't enough." The book never made it into paperback and in due time went out of print.

"I knew nothing about writing, really–only enough to copy a Faulkner novel that had overwhelmed me. I was so poorly informed I had the idea no one would notice. It was a poor tribute to Faulkner–self-conscious, unfocused. But at the core was an idea that touched me and that was untouched in the book. I see in the original book a kid who was sort of proud of himself and a little arrogant."

WhenHarper & Brothers published The Arm of Flesh , Mr. Salter was 35. He is now 74. Of the retrofitting process, Mr. Salter said, "It's like being in a writing class and correcting some very good student's work," Mr. Salter said. "I didn't have my own voice."

The author has since found plenty to change: "the tone of voice, the whole idea that this would be interesting, in terms of writing." He paused. "I was just a kid. All writers are self-taught, but I was in the beginning phases of that."

Can he picture that kid writing the book? "Yes, in a small, littered room in an old building on Peck Slip. Peck Slip wasn't gentrified then. The [South Street] Seaport wasn't there. I remember sitting there on the slip. Occasionally I'd go to lunch at Sloppy Louie's or the Paris Bar. The room cost $30 a month or something. Mark di Suvero was around the corner, there were painters down there in the area."

Mr. Salter wrote during the week and spent weekends flying in the National Guard. Now he looks up every once in a while and notices great V's of flying geese.

He hopes to turn in a finished manuscript at the end of January. Whether it's good is up for grabs. "You're never certain whether you've done the thing or not," he said.

Amy Tan had tears in her eyes. Kurt Vonnegut wore an air of resignation. The occasion was a memorial service for Faith Sale, their editor at G.P. Putnam's Sons. Ms. Sale had also worked with Donald Barthelme, Kaye Gibbons and Joseph Heller. On Friday, Jan. 7, some 400 people gathered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union to remember an editor who had spent a lifetime holding authors' hands and working with language.

Alfred A. Knopf editor in chief Sonny Mehta, media reporter Ken Auletta, outgoing Penguin Putnam Group chief executive Michael Lynton and many writers were there. Roy Blount Jr., Grace Paley, Lee Smith, Ms. Gibbons, Hilma Wolitzer, Ms. Tan and Mr. Vonnegut took the stage one after the other to talk about Ms. Sale, who died of complications relating to cancer at the beginning of December. She was 63.

"Her tastes in authors and books influenced millions of readers," said Penguin Putnam Inc.'s chief executive, Phyllis Grann. Later on, out by the crudités and cheese, Ms. Grann told The Observer that the company would not be hiring an editor to fill the vacuum left by Ms. Sale. "It's the end of an era," Ms. Grann said. "Faith is irreplaceable."

Certainly that's how her writers must feel. Ms. Tan, who lives in San Francisco but leased an apartment in New York to be with Ms. Sale when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, had tears in her eyes. She said she was a believer in ghosts, and that she planned to have regular seances with Ms. Sale to talk about "why and how she was wrong about the afterlife."

Ms. Tan is set to work with her old writing teacher Molly Giles–who does not work in the industry. But should Ms. Grann try to find another editor to take over where Ms. Sale left off? A running joke at Putnam is that the only reason Putnam acquired The Joy Luck Club (which spent 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, was translated into 28 languages and has sold more than a million copies in America since its publication in 1989), for $12,000, was because Ms. Grann was on holiday that week. Literary fiction, goes the argument, needs advocates in a commercial time.

Virginia Barber, a longtime agent who was part of a monthly dinner group with Ms. Sale, was surprised to hear of Ms. Grann's plan not to fill Ms. Sale's post. Ms. Barber, who represents such authors as Alice Munro and Carolyn Forché , said, "That would be a mistake. I trust Phyllis to find someone with the moral and intellectual commitment to publishing that Faith had, and the experience and the dignity. I mean, you don't go out and do that right away. But her publishing house is too distinguished and too broad not to have somebody of Faith's stature," Ms. Barber said.

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

I also knew that Mr. Eggers shuns earnestness and likes giving the world's phoniness what for. Still, he chose to write about how, his senior year in college, he lost both parents to cancer, and subsequently had guardianship of his 8-year-old brother, Toph. I had not yet read the book all the way through. But if his book was as good as the critics were saying, why all the bells and whistles?

I arrived at Snooky's, across from the Community Bookstore, which was hosting the event, at 7:15 for a 7:30 reading. People had been waiting around since 6 P.M.

About 150 people were in the room, average age 25. I made my way past a guy who once worked for The New Yorker and now worked for McSweeney's , whom I knew, or thought I knew, until I said hello and he gave me the cold shoulder. At which point I figured I had become persona non grata when this newspaper printed the only unfavorable review thus far of Mr. Eggers' book.

At 7:45, Catherine Bohne, manager of the Community Bookstore, introduced Mr. Eggers. He ambled into view, took off his jacket and began to shuffle behind a microphone. "These are my papers for tonight. I'm going to be reading from them." His blue eyes patrolled the room. "Hi, how are you? How are you all feeling tonight?"

After a bit of back and forth about the new issue of McSweeney's , Mr. Eggers explained about the field trip following the reading. The first 50 people to ask for a ticket would be spirited by bus to a SoHo art gallery exhibiting paintings done by elephants.

First reading was from The Fuzz , a publication written by Mr. Eggers' brother, Toph. Toph is now in high school. "This got him in a lot of trouble," Mr. Eggers said. "I'm gonna need a volunteer."

Mr. Eggers and Sarah Vowell, a friend of Mr. Eggers', read a dialogue between a high school student and a headmaster. Mr. Eggers read, "I'll be minding my own business, but every so often someone starts getting up in my grill." The audience laughed.

Soon it was time for Mr. Eggers to read from his book. He introduced his friend Brent Hoff, who would be accompanying on guitar. He then asked for people to call out page numbers.

"Forty-six."

Mr. Hoff began to strum "Boys Don't Cry" as Mr. Eggers turned to page 43. This was the beginning of Chapter 2, where he and Toph are driving along the California coast. "Is that the right key?" Mr. Eggers turned to Mr. Hoff. "That's not my key." There was some readjustment. "And a 1, 2, ready … 1, 2, 3 …" He began: "Please look. Can you see us, can you see us, in our little red car?"

Soon, another page number, a new volunteer. A woman and Mr. Eggers read the scene where he is auditioning for a part on the MTV program The Real World . Mr. Hoff played "Just Like Heaven."

After a while, the energy in the room had flagged. "This is getting kinda dark," Mr. Eggers said. "You don't care if I don't read more of that book, do you?"

He reached for a stack of large white storyboards bound with ring binders.

"I'm going to read a story from seventh grade," Mr. Eggers said. "It's called 'Hassenframer's Journey.'"

"Hassenframer," he read, "was a very lonely monster. He lived alone in a house with a bag of riches." In the end, Hassenframer winds up with friends and no riches. People smiled.

During the question period, a woman asked: "Did you want to get well known so you could read your seventh-grade stories to people?"

"Yes, of course, like anyone else, that's exactly what I've always wanted to do."

Signing time arrived. I went up to the podium to get a better look.

"Did you have a good time?" he asked a young woman.

A 22-year-old woman approached him. "I've never been to a book signing," she said. She and Mr. Eggers had a short conversation in low tones.

Mr. Eggers jiggled his leg. He twisted a hand around his wrist. I approached the woman after she had left the table. Clearly, Mr. Eggers' book had made a difference in her life.

After she left, Ms. Bohne from the bookstore came over to tell me that Mr. Eggers wanted me to leave. Either that, or stop scribbling near the signing table.

Once the table was clear, I approached the author in a spirit of neutral good will. "Hey-"

"I don't like your newspaper," he said. He elaborated at length. Several people stood within earshot. I decided not to listen. I went down to the sidewalk. Then I walked back upstairs.

Mr. Eggers was standing, a little scowly-eyed, with his editor and the bookstore people. Suddenly, silence.

"Am I interrupting?" I said.

"Well, we were just talking," Mr. Eggers' editor said.

Mr. Eggers said, "No one I know reads your newspaper."

Mr. Eggers complained that the writer who had reviewed his book for The Observer had a conflict of interest. "We sent you a letter. You didn't even print it."

We had, the day before, I told him.

"What are you doing back here, anyway?"

"For my own sanity."

"Well, I hope you'll be fair," he mumbled.

The next day, Mr. Eggers wrote about me on the McSweeney's Web site. "One strange and unfortunate thing: At this particular reading, there was in attendance a reporter from a small weekly newspaper in New York read by advertising and real estate professionals, and some who work in the media …

"The problem was, on this particular night, this reporter was hovering, just behind the signing table, busily scribbling into her notebook much of what she could glean from the conversations between reader and writer …

"It's very hard to express how unsettling it all was. Such a contrast, between these kind and open people, talking about the sorts of things they were talking about, and this reporter person, without good intentions, preying upon them. It was very creepy. Wow was it creepy."

Mr. Eggers, it seemed to me, had assumed a great deal about my intentions. Nonetheless, I had been impolite. And I regret that.

Out on Union Street, 15 people were waiting for Mr. Eggers to join them for the outing to the art gallery. On his Web posting, Mr. Eggers explained: "The problem was, when we all left the reading and waited outside for the bus, that bus did not arrive. Ever."

I went home by cab.

True, Ms. Mosle's 17-page proposal–for her first book ever–didn't quite get her to the million mark. But it did set off a minor frenzy that resulted in one of the biggest nonfiction book deals of the year. On Nov. 2, Alfred A. Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin (with a nod from the boss) plunked down $850,000 for the opportunity to publish Boom: An American Explosion . It concerns an accident that killed more than 300 children in the East Texas town of New London in 1937, when an errant spark hit a gas leak in a school basement. The event was a top news story of the day, but you'd have a hard time finding it in the history books. So much the better; Ms. Mosle's book cannot be written off as another The Perfect Storm or Into Thin Air wannabe. Which is to say, fresh tears ahead.

The disaster genre, it would seem, is alive and well. Sure, the cold-air adventure side of things might be wearing thin, what with the 1996 Mt. Everest tragedy tapped out and all. But four new books on the tragic 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart yacht competition are still coming off the presses. The timeless appeal of bad weather, bad families and bad luck still sells. Just ask Oprah Winfrey. "There are so many of these disaster books," said Time Warner Trade Publishing chief executive Laurence Kirshbaum. "We've seen half a dozen major proposals in the last six weeks."

In big-league publishing, the best way to bring out the handkerchiefs is to go wide and deep. Don't isolate the tragedy. Talk to the survivors ("characters"), try to rhyme it with a current event (in this case, Littleton, Colo.), reach into the heart, and craft an American tale. Erik Larson did that with Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time , and The Deadliest Hurricane in History . As a reward, his story about the 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston, Tex., and the early days of the U.S. Weather Bureau won nine weeks on The New York Times best seller list.

Ms. Mosle's proposal immediately drew attention from six major publishers. Her agent, David McCormick of IMG Literary, sent it to Harper Collins; Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group; Houghton Mifflin Company; Riverhead Books; Alfred A. Knopf; Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the Random House Trade Book Group (known as "Little Random"). Farrar passed. The rest were interested.

Within a few days, the bidders had narrowed down to Riverhead editor Chris Knutsen, Little Random senior literary editor Daniel Menaker and Knopf's Ms. Pavlin.

One editor, upon hearing about the deal, said, "People are desperate for stuff that's offbeat and interesting." And in Ms. Mosle's case, the editor explained, her gender makes the project even more offbeat. "She's a woman writing about violence. This could mean a potential publicity bonanza. Is she well connected? They could get her on Oprah ."

Ms. Mosle, who will be 36 later this month, is indeed connected. It is an occupational hazard of working in the incestuous East Coast media establishment. Since 1995, she has leapfrogged from The New Yorker to The New York Times Magazine to The New York Times Book Review and back again to The Magazine . Her last two gigs were as an editor. She has also taught third grade in a public school in Washington Heights, appeared on Charlie Rose to talk about education reform and written for The New Republic.

Ms. Mosle said her book went to the "people I knew least … I had never met Sonny or Jordan before," she said, referring to Ms. Pavlin and Sonny Mehta, the editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. "I don't think I was on their map."

She is now. Her proposal, obtained by The Observer , is an object lesson in how to tastefully pitch a tragedy. "I want to tell the story of a boomtown and explore the high price of American aspiration," reads the proposal, written in the form of a letter to her agent. "It's a tragedy, as you'll see, whose meaning is still relevant today."

Here's how Ms. Mosle's proposal yoked New London to this year's events in Littleton, Colo., where two students shot up Columbine High School and killed one teacher and 12 classmates. "If the outpouring of emotion after Littleton represents one extreme in a community's response to tragedy, then the silence about the tragedy that quickly enveloped New London represents the other, and together they serve as bookends to a history of American grief." In the "vast non-Freudian America" of 1937, Ms. Mosle wrote, "there were no grief counselors."

Asked about the connection to Littleton, which was cited four times in the proposal, Ms. Mosle said in a phone interview, "I think all these resonances to modern-day time will be up to readers." She added, "I mentioned it in the proposal. I didn't try to capitalize on it in any way."

Ms. Pavlin was almost dismissive of the Littleton connection. "I don't see the two as being related at all," she said. "Sara is using the story of this terrible accident to tell a much larger story about America just before the outbreak of World War II, about a particular kind of American tragedy, about oil and greed and lost hopes."

Ms. Mosle, a native of Dallas, said she had heard stories about the disaster from her mother, who was a child at the time. "The idea that was interesting to me was a community that loses all its children," Ms. Mosle said. She initially tried writing a novel. It didn't work. "I wasn't happy with how it was going. I didn't know that much about the event. One weekend last February, I visited this museum [the New London Museum, home to relevant documents and artifacts], and then I realized that was the story. The novel wasn't playing to my strengths," she said. "It was a matter of matching the story with the proper form." She will tell the story in three parts, she explains in her proposal: the "terrible disaster, the boom leading up to it, and the [almost yearlong] civil trial that followed … my book will offer a portrait of a quintessential American boom town."

Possibly the boom is in the eye of the beholder. "I'm not sure I would call New London a boomtown, in the full sense of the term," said Chris Casteneda, an associate professor of history at California State University in Sacramento and the author of Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800-2000 . "East Texas was a boomtown region, I'd agree with that," he said. Then he added, "I hope she doesn't try to show that this event is connected with all sorts of changes that occurred in the industry. I don't think she'd be writing this book if there wasn't a sensationalist aspect to it. This is basically a minor problem that results in a major tragedy."

The accident may never have happened if the New London school board had not decided to save some extra money and siphon unmarketed natural gas–from a waste line–apparently gratis. The line it tapped contained gas with no odorant, and so the leak went undetected.

To Ms. Mosle, the accident had wide-ranging implications. "The explosion is … the prototype for a particular kind of 20th-century tragedy, one in which arrogance, hatred or greed is disastrously amplified by technology," reads her proposal.

That stuff's for the book. What comes across loud and clear in the proposal is carnage. Several pages of it, from a severed head to the casket shortage to the wailing in the night. Ms. Mosle re-created the event in vivid detail.

"Proposals like this are rare," said Ms. Pavlin, who has worked in publishing for nine years. "It has all the elements of a great story, and she [Ms. Mosle] is uniquely suited to write it. She has been a public school teacher herself, she's passionate about education, she's born and raised in Texas."

She is also suited to write about grief: "And I know from the death of my own older sister (from cancer) when I was seven how grief can play out in a family," reads one of the last lines in her proposal. Among the clips sent along with it was a 1995 New Yorker article she had written about her students' journals and her sister's death.

Ms. Pavlin, who this year published Susan Minot's novel Evening and Nathan Englander's story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and will be editing new nonfiction works by Rich Cohen and Rick Bragg, noted that she has been following Ms. Mosle's byline for years. "We think she'll be a terrific promoter. Readers will really respond to the story and to her."

Ms. Mosle oozes credibility. " The New Yorker and The New York Times –those are the best credentials of all," said an agent whose clientele includes journalists. "Credentials always matter, track record matters less. Publishers want confidence that their investment is with someone who has the kind of history that suggests a really professional, reliable author," said the agent.

One veteran editor thought otherwise. "Sometimes the difference between being a good book writer and a good journalist is the difference between a marathoner and a miler," said the editor.

"I was amazed there was so much interest in the book," said Ms. Mosle. "It's not like I've never written anything, but I'm appreciative to Knopf."

She's particularly grateful to Mr. McCormick, who toiled with her for months. "We started with a traditional proposal that was much more roman numeralesque," said Ms. Mosle. Then they hit upon the conceit of a letter, complete with Mr. McCormick's address, a "Dear David," and the sign-off: "All best, Sara Mosle."

Ultimately, she and Mr. McCormick cranked out 18 drafts of the proposal, calling the project BT (for boomtown) in its traditional form, and Boom in its epistolary one. Mr. McCormick did time at Texas Monthly and in the fiction department of The New Yorker . "The thing I'm appreciative to him [Mr. McCormick] for is his editing–'Should this paragraph be here, be there?'" said Ms. Mosle. "Just what you do when you line-edit something. Mr. McCormick declined to be interviewed.

"I realized that the right way to tell the story was through the individual characters," she said. As the proposal states, "Each part [of the book] will have its own engine of suspense–the exciting search for oil, the fate of the people we've come to care about, the verdict of the trial–that will drive the narrative forward."

In January, Ms. Mosle will bid farewell to The Times and head south to "spend some time on rigs … and remind myself of the weather of my youth." There are more survivors to interview as well. "They were open, but it was clear they had never talked about it before," she said. "Often they were very emotional. I didn't get any resistance."

In order to earn back the advance, Knopf will have to convince some 200,000 members of the book-buying public that Ms. Mosle's book is a must-read. It is scheduled for publication in spring 2002, and will subsequently be published in paperback by the Knopf Publishing Group's Vintage Anchor Publishing Division.

"Popular American history is easy to sell," said an editor who had seen Ms. Mosle's proposal. "It's like [Sebastian Junger's] The Perfect Storm or the second volume of the Eleanor Roosevelt biography. [ Boom ] is the type of book that gets prominent review attention, which is half the battle to making a best seller. And there's book club sales. It could be a book review cover. It's the kind of book that gets nominated for prizes."

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

It was 4 P.M. on a Friday, about the time one's blood sugar faints away, and Ms. Pera was at New York University's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, on West 12th Street, for an "espresso talk." The subject was her new novel, Lo's Diary , a retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the nymphet's point of view. Thirteen members of the university community faced the 43-year-old author, who came to talk about the book that no American reviewer wants to praise.

One after the other, Salon , The Washington Post Book World , Time magazine, Los Angeles Times Book Review , Newsweek , The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review took umbrage with Ms. Pera's novel. First flay, then filet.

Ms. Pera seemed to be taking in stride their criticism of her creative powers and writing style. "If Time magazine cuts me to pieces, this is the way it should be," she said. "It was not a surprise."

But perhaps the second part of her North American tour was feeling a bit light. New York City was Ms. Pera's only stop in the United States, and the schedule was shaping up like so: an interview with the trade magazine Publishers Weekly , the N.Y.U. visit and a chat with The Observer . Ms. Pera had spent the previous week in Canada, where she had been interviewed by two daily newspapers, visited with some university folks and attended the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival. There had been four book signings in Toronto and Vancouver; there were no book signings in New York. Also no television appearances; once scheduled, they had evaporated. "The negative reviews obviously had an effect on people not being interested in talking to her," said Ellen Ryder, an independent publicist hired by Publishers Group West, which distributes titles for Foxrock Inc., Ms. Pera's American publisher.

But here on West 12th Street, people were very interested in hearing from Ms. Pera and had followed the history of her book, from its 1995 publication in her native Italy (where the book has sold about 20,000 copies) to its American debut on Oct. 29. Nabokov's son and sole proprietor of the literary estate, Dmitri, had tried to block the book on its way to English-language publication, claiming copyright infringement. Then he worked out a settlement and wrote a preface to Ms. Pera's novel. Ms. Pera wrote an afterword, but she withdrew after learning Mr. Nabokov had read it; she was not given the opportunity to read his. She hopes to publish the afterword in a periodical.

"There was a lot of copyright problems, a lot of debate," Ms. Pera told her audience. "If Vladimir Nabokov had been alive, copyright problems probably wouldn't have arisen. I think he would've had a sense of humor. I would've sent it to him, shyly, to a great writer." She smiled and raised her eyebrows.

Ms. Pera's book and its journey to the printing press represents a sort of Gordian knot of legal and esthetic issues. Does Lolita belong to the world, or to the Nabokov estate? Is Ms. Pera's book a ripoff or a reimagining? Esthetic judgment pulls things a bit tighter: If an author "borrows" a recognizable character for a book, does it have any bearing on copyright whether the book is considered bad or good? Several recent novels that revisit famous works-for instance, Ahab's Wife , by Sena Jeter Naslund, and The Hours , by Michael Cunningham-have thrown such questions into greater relief. (In Ms. Naslund's case, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is in the public domain.) Lo's Diary visits a work whose copyright doesn't expire until 2050.

Other recent books have resuscitated little Lo, among them Roger Fishbite , by Emily Prager, and Love in a Dead Language: A Romance , by Lee Siegel. But Ms. Pera's book is the one that stirred Nabokov fils to action.

Ms. Pera told her N.Y.U. audience a story she had heard, about a visit Nabokov père once made to Cambridge University. "Apparently, Véra [Nabokov's wife and secretary] interrupted the lecture and started ordering students to stop taking notes: 'You're taking my husband's ideas.' Dmitri is following in the family business," Ms. Pera quipped.

She went on. "My book is a protest of the easy way of killing the heroine by having her die. There was a great need to talk about Lolita. Lolita is a book about the desire of a man, a desire for things young and immature and defenseless, a longing for this kind of unattainable youth. I incarnate his 'bad reader,' a character who takes the story at face value and takes on a life of her own. I take Lolita out of Nabokov's world. My Lolita is not a nice girl, not mother loving. She's not normal. The child cannot be loved because she did not have the chance to develop a personality that would be lovable. My book is not about lust, it's a lot about mother hatred. Another big taboo, I discovered."

The audience, nine of whom were women, sat in silence.

Ms. Pera said things were fine until the book approached the English language market. "Finnish, who cares? Greek, who cares? But English, that's a lot of money," said Ms. Pera.

At 4:30, she said, "I read a little." She rolled her R a little. "The first passage is about a day she's not yet succeeded in seducing Humbert Humbert. Some of the reviews, she was seen as too aggressive, too calculating. I think it's rubbish. That's what young people are like, they think they can conquer people." She began to read. She gestured as she read. She tossed her head, wrinkled her forehead, shrugged her shoulders.

Ms. Pera stopped to talk about her research for the book. "I wanted to know what the times were like. I read quite a few diaries of girls of the time. I got a hold of photographs of the time, magazines of the time. Lolita is a myth, an emblem of our time, of this postwar period, the most important one. And she is a coeval to atomic energy," said Ms. Pera "She's a tough kid but has the kind of abnormal energy that you cut, like when an atom is split. Writing about Lolita is a lot about writing about the violence of our time and surviving it.

"Some people said she's horrible because she's cynical and I thought, Do you write the truth in a diary? I doubt it. If you are to write the truth, that you're helpless in the hands of someone else, you wouldn't be able to go on. The diary is like armor. The novel begins at the end of the book, after she gets out of the armor."

Soon it was time for espresso and butter cookies.

Francesca Magniani, a 27-year-old, third-year doctoral student from Padua, did not think Lo's Diary in any way slighted Nabokov's masterpiece. "Not at all," she said. "It's like a pretext for reading the book. It's always an homage to an author when you take their world and work on it, even when it's a polemical approach."

A man who had not read Ms. Pera's work was similarly sanguine. "I think you'd be able to enjoy it more if you read Nabokov first," said Livio Caroli, 55, who plays oboe with the New York City Opera. "There are many Lolitas in opera," said Mr. Caroli. "Carmen. There is also Manon. La Traviata , by Verdi. A woman always the symbol," he said. "There's a Lolita at least a couple of productions a week."

Francesco Erspamer, the 45-year-old chair of the Italian department at N.Y.U. who arranged Ms. Pera's talk, said he did not consider Lo's Diary a "rewriting" of Lolita . He read the book in Italian. "It's a very postmodern book, because there's heavy use in postmodernism literature of characters by other people," said Mr. Erspamer. "Decontextualizing is typical." But if the book didn't have the Nabokov connection, would he have been interested in the book? "I enjoyed reading the book," he said. "I didn't have in mind Lolita ." And yet, "Without that, it's weaker or less interesting. It needs another text to refer to. You have to know Lolita is already a literary character."

The group dispersed, and Ms. Pera sat down to talk a bit more about her literary mission. "I felt a kind of anger the way she was so easily disposed off and killed." And swept into pornography's lexicon. "You go on the Internet and find lots of porno sites with Lolita," said Ms. Pera. She named some: "Lolita Land, Lolita Bootymania, Lolita X-Com, with tons of rape pics and Kosovo Lolita rape."

To the charge that her book does not even begin to approach Nabokov's mastery, Ms. Pera said, "Of course it's not the same Lolita. I'm not trying to compete with Nabokov, I'm trying to get people to think anew. Why a new opera? Why a new movie? You want to express something in the own sensibility of your time."

Is Ms. Pera working on another book? "Yes, Dmitri Nabokov's true diary," she quipped. Actually, her next one "is a book of nonfiction on utopian socialists in Europe." She is also working on another work of fiction; it "is not taking issue with any other book or character."

Even if it did, this is a different thing than the kind of appropriation that really gets under her skin: "When you use beautiful, famous music, the climax of a musical piece, for instance, with all its power, and use it to sell commodities. Wagner's Valkyrian song can be used for a car. And then the sense of the music is distorted by this unwanted subconscious association, and it's all ruined for you this pleasure. And I get angry about that," she said, "because no one asked Wagner or Rossini or Beethoven. Here is a common culture we all share, it's being distorted and no one can protect it. The reception of this music has no defense. It's been banalized, trivialized."

Could the same argument be made against Lo's Diary ? "I don't feel I'm doing that," said Ms. Pera. "I feel I'm really seriously taking on something that concerns all of us in a serious way. I'm not making commodity, not making commercial. If anything, I am rescuing this Lolita image from this worn-out porno exploitation. I'm not using Lolita to advertise a condom line or an erotic lingerie line."

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

When Bertelsmann bought Random House from Advance Publications Inc. in July 1998, it guaranteed itself a very expensive adventure in the wilds of the Manhattan marketplace. It signed a deal that allowed the subsidiary-now known as "old" Random-to remain at 201 East 50th Street for two years. At which point the rent would double. Instead of seeking long-term rental space in an existing building, Bertelsmann decided to put up a lavish new building for its book publishing empire, first across the street from its 1540 Broadway headquarters and then, when that deal fell through, on a site on Broadway between 55th and 56th streets. But that's taken longer than two years. Now the rent increase has become a reality, and ground hasn't even been broken for its new tower.

So the company has had to resort to temporary housing for several hundred employees. Cost: tens of millions of dollars and considerable hand-wringing.

Things have gotten so woolly, Bertelsmann is now talking with landlords at two separate locations. There's a lot of schlepping in Random House's future. By the end of June 2000, the several hundred denizens housed in the "old" Random House building must relocate to space at 280 Park Avenue and 299 Park Avenue, where Bertelsmann is currently negotiating leases. The price of the space, to be occupied for between two and three years, will range from $55 to $59 per square foot; Bertelsmann currently pays $40 per square foot for the 389,688 square feet it leases at 201 East 50th Street.

A Random House internal memorandum issued Nov. 8 stated that one appeal of the chosen locations includes an arrangement "for all Random House employees to be able to use the 299 Park Avenue cafeteria, which we will subsidize, whose menu prices will be comparable to those at 1540." Employees will also keep their present telephone numbers.

The memorandum, signed by Random House chief executive Peter W. Olson and president Erik Engstrom, explained, "We anticipated signing a new multi-year lease at East 50th Street, and we offered the lease holder, Advance Publications Inc., an enormous premium over the market value of the space in order to achieve this. However, Advance has declined to enter into renewal negotiations with us at any price and has reclaimed all of our space, which is their right as our landlord."

Things were more relaxed back in July 1998, when Bertelsmann signed its two-year sublease. Then, no one seemed to be aware of the difficulties of finding a huge hunk of space in a bull market. And higher-ups thought they could renegotiate a holdover clause that would increase the rent to $80 per square foot, if they were still there in two years. Advance has 19 years left on the lease; it is currently fielding bids from several large law firms and a major nonprofit organization.

"It was their impression that they could walk into any building and say, 'We're Bertelsmann and we want 300,000 square feet for two years,' and everybody would say, 'Fine,'" said an industry source with knowledge of the circumstances. "They're arrogant, they don't want advice from people. I cannot think of another company-even companies with big real estate departments-that has done it by themselves. It's a special skill, developing a plan. The marketplace is smarter than everybody. They thought it was going to save them money and fees. Now it's going to cost them so much more," said the source. "It's a no-brainer."

The company spent the better part of 1998 negotiating a deal for a site across the street from 1540 Broadway; just before last Thanksgiving, the deal fell apart.

So Bertelsmann decided to look for long-term space to lease. John C. Cushman III, the president of Cushman Realty Corporation, came on in early 1998 to help Bertelsmann evaluate alternatives for building sites and long-term rental space. Late this summer, Cushman & Wakefield Inc. vice chairman Donald A. DiRenzo Sr. was brought in to help find a short-term lease. Bertelsmann president Robert Sorrentino and Random House Inc. senior vice president and general counsel Harriette Dorsen are the company representatives most closely involved with the relocation.

Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum declined to comment on the company's decision to wait until the beginning of 1998 to seek guidance. "We've had wise and knowing counsel for an extended period of time," he said. "We're very happy with the advice and direction we've received from the knowledgeable real estate experts who have been of assistance to us."

"Over time, we considered any number of options," said Mr. Applebaum, "but our first and prevailing ambition was always to build a new Random House building."

There are plenty of media companies full of smart men, but a trip into the real estate jungle usually prompts a call for expertise. Advance, for instance, hired Insignia-ESG Inc., just as Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the New York Times Company once did. Time Warner Inc. rang up Julien J. Studley Inc.

Mr. Cushman worked on a fee basis, not on commission. That meant that whether or not he came through, Bertelsmann still had to shell out the cash. Company representatives went from one location to the next-from 622 Third Avenue to 685 Third Avenue to 1166 Avenue of the Americas to 1633 Broadway-trying to find the temporary digs known as "swing space." Landlords were interested in 10-year leases, not two-year ones.

"The market is very tight for large blocks of space, especially ones over 150,000 square feet," said Jay Neveloff, a real estate lawyer at Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel. "And you don't really market short-term bulk space in a prime area except in very unusual circumstances."

One theory about how Bertelsmann managed to back itself into a corner concerns the company's 1992 real estate coup for its current headquarters at 1540 Broadway. At the bottom of the market, Bertelsmann bought an empty 1-million-square-foot office tower from a real estate partnership that had gone bankrupt; Mayor David Dinkins sweetened the pot with $10.8 million in tax breaks. Mr. Olson, then president of Bertelsmann Inc., is credited with orchestrating the deal. But the triumph may have lulled Mr. Olson and company into believing they had real estate expertise instead of fortuitous timing. And so, this time around, at the top of the market, Bertelsmann was caught off guard.

Then came another wrinkle: At the beginning of September, on the verge of securing a $28 million tax incentive package from the city for its new Broadway tower, Bertelsmann walked away rather than undergo an environmental impact review. The report would have set the company's plans back as much as a year. Some in the real estate community branded Bertelsmann as the first company in New York City history to ask for tax breaks and then turn them down. Actually, the package never even made it to the Economic Development Corporation's board, so technically it didn't turn down anything.

Now the company must focus not only on constructing a 25-story mixed-use tower, it must brace itself for a nomadic existence over the next three years. Costs can run into the tens of millions of dollars, what with everything from laying cables to printing stationery. Not to mention sorting out who gets the best offices.

"We know that 201 East 50th Street has been a valued professional home for so many of you over the years, and we empathize with the sense of separation you may be beginning to feel," reads the Random House memo. "We will do everything we reasonably can to make your impending move as smoothly organized as possible and your work environment in your new location comfortable and compatible while our permanent home is being built."

And the fate of the decorative metal Random House colophon in the lobby of 201 East 50th Street? "We haven't really gotten that far in our interim space planning," said Mr. Applebaum. "It certainly won't be up by the end of June. We hope to have some way to display that our new space is home to some Random House publishing."

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

During past scandals, St. Martin's has taken an "it-will-blow-over" attitude. But first thing on the morning of Oct. 26, St. Martin's editor in chief, Robert B. Wallace, resigned.

Mr. Wallace wasn't falling on his sword, he was getting out of Dodge. First, he personally informed John Sargent, president of St. Martin's parent company, Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings, and Sally Richardson, president and publisher of St. Martin's trade division. Then the 48-year-old Mr. Wallace sent out a press release from a copy store fax which read, " Fortunate Son was acquired, edited and published by Thomas Dunne Books, an autonomous imprint within St. Martin's Press, over which neither I nor anyone on my staff has oversight or control … As I do not in any way wish to have my name associated with Fortunate Son or future books published by Thomas Dunne Books over which I have no control, I am regretfully compelled to tender my resignation … effective immediately."

Indeed, Mr. Dunne reports directly to Ms. Richardson, and she did not bring Mr. Wallace into the loop on the Hatfield book. Three years ago, Thomas Dunne Books weathered a similar scandal when it canceled a biography of Joseph Goebbels after it was revealed that the author was a Holocaust revisionist.

After learning about Mr. Hatfield's past, St. Martin's recalled 70,000 copies of Fortunate Son (plus 20,000 at the warehouse). Recalls are pretty rare in the industry, and, for a week, the house did damage control as the media coverage mounted. But what has puzzled people in the industry is how St. Martin's managed to publish such a biography by such an author, and why the book's serious allegations didn't raise red flags inside the publishing house. Those questions in some ways boiled down to, "What about Bob?" But Mr. Wallace's resignation and press release would appear to have given him safe distance from the imbroglio.

Mr. Wallace, who became St. Martin's editor on April 1, 1997, has solid journalistic roots: He was editor of the Denver Post , executive editor of Rolling Stone , senior editor at Newsweek and a senior producer of ABC's PrimeTime Live . Not the kind of editor likely to let a possibly libelous cocaine accusation slip into print without some additional effort devoted to tracking down the credibility of author and accusation.

But apparently St. Martin's didn't sound any alarms, even given that the Bush cocaine allegations showed up not in the main text, but in the book's afterword, which was shoehorned in just five weeks before the book was published.

The alarms weren't far off. After the Dallas Morning News broke the story of Mr. Hatfield's felonious past on Oct. 21, Ms. Richardson sent out a company wide e-mail which said that the book was signed "based on a strong proposal from a previously published author from a reputable New York agent with whom we've done a lot of business." The e-mail also stated that a "highly credentialed attorney deemed [the book] well-sourced."

Ms. Richardson wrote that after St. Martin's received a telephone call from a Dallas reporter on Oct. 20, asking if Mr. Hatfield was convicted of attempted murder in 1988, the book's publication process was suspended. "The moment we started to hear that there were possible problems, we acted quickly, decisively and honorably," she wrote. Striking a blithe note, she wrote, "We've knowingly published felons in the past, and I'm sure will again (think Peltier and Bunker)." She was referring to Leonard Peltier, who wrote Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance , and Edward Bunker, who wrote Education of a Felon .

But the fallout hasn't been overly jolly.

Mr. Hatfield came to St. Martin's in November 1998: A young editor with the Thomas Dunne imprint, Barry Neville, signed Mr. Hatfield to write a biography of George W. Bush for $25,000. Mr. Hatfield's previous books included The Ultimate Unauthorized X-Cyclopedia: The Definitive Reference Guide to the X-Files and Lost in Space: The Ultimate Trivia Challenge for the Classic TV Series , both published by Kensington Publishing Corporation.

But in St. Martin's eyes, "This man was presented to us as a columnist, a journalist, a person with reputation in Texas and Arkansas," said Thomas Dunne.

Mr. Hatfield's agent is Laura Tucker, then at the literary agency Richard Curtis Associates Inc.; she recently left to join Vigliano Associates L.L.P. Ms. Tucker did not return telephone calls.

Asked why Mr. Hatfield did not publish his latest book with Kensington, editor in chief Paul Dinas declined comment, and said that Mr. Hatfield "is involved in litigation" with the house.

Mr. Hatfield had been under contract to write another biography for St. Martin's, of an unknown subject, a book that presumably will not be published by the house. The author, who became unreachable a day into his scheduled publicity tour, spoke out from the Drudge Report on Oct. 24, and said he was the victim of a "smear campaign and character assassination efforts" who had been "forced to send my wife and less-than-a-month-old baby girl into hiding."

While Mr. Dunne told the on-line magazine Salon that the book was fact-checked, in book publishing parlance that may simply mean that spellings and dates were verified. It does not necessarily mean that Mr. Hatfield was asked to back up his allegations with information on where the alleged arrest was made, the name of the arresting officer and so forth. The lawyer who vetted the book for St. Martin's was Celeste Phillips, a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Levine, Sullivan & Koch. Ms. Phillips, a specialist in publishing law, declined to comment. Her colleague Michael D. Sullivan told The Observer , "Our position is that we did a legal review," he said. "It would not be appropriate to discuss what was done and what wasn't done. That's attorney-client privilege."

Asked if he or anyone at St. Martin's had asked the author about his background, Mr. Dunne said, "I don't know if anybody did. I leave that to the lawyers."

While formal background checks do not usually figure into a publishing house's acquisition process, "Experienced editors have strong bullshit detectors," said Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal. "Even though you have your lawyers checking for actionable material, a good nonfiction editor comes to a controversial book with a healthy dose of skepticism."

Asked about his own role, or nonrole, in the book's publication, Mr. Wallace said, "It's a Tom Dunne book, and I have no oversight."

Mr. Dunne said, of Mr. Wallace, "As far I knew, he knew all about [the book]. It was in the catalogue to start with. Bob and I have the best relationship, but he never said a word that I recall, ever, positive or negative on the book. He wasn't involved with its publication."

"Bob Wallace was not involved in any way, shape or form," echoed St. Martin's publicity director John Murphy.

Hours after Mr. Wallace resigned, Ms. Richardson issued a press release asserting the opposite: "Several weeks prior to the book's publication, Bob Wallace read the afterword and advised on various aspects of the book's launch. At no time prior to its release did he object to the afterword or the publication of the book."

Mr. Dunne said he was the one who decided to push the publication date of Mr. Hatfield's book up to this October, instead of January 2000. That was done to compete with First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty , by Dallas Morning News reporter Bill Minutaglio, published by the Times Books imprint of Random House Inc., on Oct. 15.

In the wake of St. Martin's recall of the book, Random House is scrambling to distinguish its book. "We want to make sure there's no confusion in the mind of readers," said assistant publicity director Will Weisser.

So, how does a book like Fortunate Son make it into bookstores?

"It has to do with intensifying pressure of the bottom line," said New York University media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller. "There are structural reasons this is happening. They rushed this book out to compete with the Random House book and to grab headlines. And that's no way to run a publishing company."

"Looking at this under a microscope, everyone's aghast," said one agent who handles biographies. "On the other hand, the quickie bio is part of New York publishing. If an agent says a guy can make the deadline …"

Three more Bush books are coming soon: Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush , by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, from Random House; W: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the Bush Dynasty , by a former George magazine editor, Elizabeth Mitchell, due from Hyperion Books; and the official tome on the Texas governor, A Charge to Keep , ghost-written by his communications director Karen P. Hughes, due from William Morrow and Company.

As St. Martin's pulps Mr. Hatfield's book, the stench is sure to have a reach. "This sort of thing is not good for newspapers, publishers, books," said Simon & Schuster's Mr. Rosenthal. "Over many years, I've edited Hunter S. Thompson, whose motto has long been, If you call somebody a pigfucker, you damn well better be able to produce the pig."

"Was it the merger or was it the cigarettes?" he asked softly in his Oxbridge tone. He paused. "It was the cholesterol," he said. "I had two fried eggs a day for breakfast. I had no checkups for five years. I kept meaning to go. The doctor would probably say it was years of bad living. I've always had a good time. Maybe I've had too good a time. Now I think I'm going to live forever, and I'm looking forward to running Knopf into the ground."

He went on. "I don't have a glamorous life style. We all have our notions of sport. If I'd wanted to fucking make my living climbing mountains, I wouldn't have gone into publishing. Most of the time you're sitting in a dark room reading a fucking manuscript. I have nothing but regret that I cannot continue to behave the way I behaved all my life, and I can't wait for a chance to behave immoderately again."

But immoderate behavior, always part of publishing's raffish charm, doesn't rank high on Random House Inc. chief executive Peter Olson's list. Or so it would seem. After Mr. Mehta's surgery, the 49-year-old Mr. Olson, who favors pre-breakfast workouts at the Harvard Club, told Mr. Mehta's loyal subjects, "Sonny has some life style issues he's determined to conquer."

If so, Mr. Mehta wasn't starting tonight, as he quaffed almost three glasses of wine in two hours–to no effect. How was it being back? "It's as black as it's always been," he quipped.

And maybe getting blacker. It had been more than a year since Bertelsmann, the world's largest publisher of English-language books, acquired what is now known as "old" Random House from S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr.'s Advance Publications, thereby snapping up two of the nation's most prestigious houses, the Random House Trade Group and Alfred A. Knopf, the 84-year-old flagship imprint of the Knopf Publishing Group. The group comprises Knopf, Vintage Books, Pantheon Books, Schocken Books and Everyman's Library.

With flair, edge and gravitas, Alfred A. Knopf has set a high-water mark in American publishing. It was a bit sleepy when Mr. Mehta arrived from across the pond in 1987. Now it pulls at the chattering classes like an undertow. Knopf authors include Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Michael Crichton, Susan Minot, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Today, the story of trade publishing could be said to be the story of Mr. Mehta writ large. As Sonny goes, so goes a certain tenor of the business. If things get too cramped under Bertelsmann, and he leaves, it would serve notice on an entire world and a way of living in it. And then who knows what might befall the house Alfred A. Knopf founded in 1915?

"I don't think Sonny is in love with his situation," said one publishing executive. "If the right opportunity came along in England–something like running Channel 4–he'd take it."

What did Mr. Mehta do on his summer vacation, besides editing Timeline , Mr. Crichton's new novel?

"Mostly, I thought about whether life is worth living without cigarettes," he said. Now he's into gum. "Do we know the complete truth about chewing gum?" he said. "I'm resolved to make the best of it. They tell me I'll never be in the marathon, but I was never in great danger of that."

He has been taking naps and walking seven miles a day. There are "dog people, sleeping people and running people," he said. "And then there's me trying to live my pathetic life."

Mr. Mehta, 56, has deep brown eyes and wears filament-thin spectacles the color of pilot lights. A thatch of beard. Plenty of hair, some gray around the temples and mouth. He's known for not speaking more than he has to. Some say it's a Brahmin thing, some a Machiavellian one.

Knopf senior editor Jonathan Segal said that boredom is Mr. Mehta's "biggest enemy. Sonny wants from people an enrichment of himself. He's crazy when he's bored. He just has to keep making discoveries. When you go with him to hear country music or Brazilian music, he loves it. When he's listening to Mahler, he has tears in his eyes."

And when he reads Michael Crichton, said Mr. Segal, it's because he actually likes his books. "Sonny has a genuine fascination with Michael Crichton. He gets a genuine thrill, not a lip-service thrill."

Mr. Mehta also thrills to the Savile Row suit and the well-stitched shoe. He likes shooting and cricket. He also likes humidity.

"He's competitive the English way," said an acquaintance from Mr. Mehta's London days. "He was laid back to the point where you were afraid he'd fall over. He seems to be asleep, but he's like a crocodile–don't put your foot in the water. Sonny's allegiance is to Sonny. That's what makes him dangerous to a corporation. He's capable of walking away from things."

Mr. Mehta's friend, journalist Christopher Hitchens, calls this Mr. Mehta's "fuck-off capacity."

Life under Mr. Newhouse's Advance Publications was freewheeling: Lincoln Town Cars, long lunches, large author advances. Now, under Bertelsmann, said a former member of the Knopf Group, "They're more exacting about the budget. Under Newhouse, it was ludicrous. Nothing was ever questioned. Anything Sonny wanted to get through–a book, a way around house policy on parties and expenses–he got through."

It was the sort of atmosphere that would make Reinhard Mohn, the 78-year-old chairman emeritus of Bertelsmann, cringe. Mr. Mohn, who grew up in a house where alcohol and tobacco were forbidden, prides himself on eating in the company cafeteria. "Mohn is obsessed with figures," said one who has a longtime familiarity with Bertelsmann. "Bertelsmann has a huge central accounting unit. They have about 400 people who process and analyze figures all day."

So at "old" Random, expenses for hotels and airline trips have been trimmed. The mailroom has been outsourced to Pitney Bowes. The book room–a sort of on-premise mini-warehouse that doubles as a barometer for which books are arousing interest–lost its staff and operates only two hours a day.

And Knopf, always known for beautifully designed books, now finds itself, along with the rest of old Random House, with a new paper merchant. "They awarded a contract to a merchant we had not previously worked with," said Andrew Hughes, vice president of production and design for the Knopf Group. "It's a matter of opinion whether you think it's as good as the paper we used in the past. The mill said they'd make enhancements."

"Bertelsmann thinks there's no reason why things can't be done cheaper and more efficiently," said a Knopf Group employee. "Maybe there's a disconnect between the rigidity of their plan and the creative atmosphere that needs to be fostered. It's all about how you can create the kind of books where you fly out and spend days working with the author."

Mr. Mehta maintained that nothing has changed. "Peter Olson has left us alone," he said. "If there are any changes, they haven't happened yet."

Asked about Bertelsmann's approach, one Knopf Group employee said, "They're smug, and even arrogant: 'What a quaint little place you guys have here. We're going to show you how to really run it.'"

There was certainly nothing quaint about the dinner last April at Marriott's Camelback Inn and Resort, in Scottsdale, Ariz. The occasion was a Random House Inc. sales conference, an event that marked the beginning of the integration of Bertelsmann's American publishing holdings. Fifty tables of 10 were set up around a burbling fountain. From wicker baskets, people chose ping-pong balls marked with table numbers. Some of the Knopf Group staff quietly exchanged their balls or took more than one, so they could sit together.

Toward the end of the evening, lots of people from the Bertelsmann side were doing high fives. Then Mr. Olson and another man picked up David Naggar, a young vice president of sales and development, and threw him into the fountain.

It was a representative moment out there on the Arizona flats. Mr. Mehta and Mr. Olson have two things in common: an ability to get to the top of the heap and a healthy regard for the bottom line. Their differences are far greater, even down to sartorial style: Mr. Olson in suits or khakis, Mr. Mehta in a black wool pullover and jeans with a steel kara–a Sikh symbol of restraint and gentility–around his wrist. Speaking of Bertelsmann's attitude toward Mr. Mehta, one member of the Knopf Group staff said, "They wish he would get out and play basketball with them. They bond in that way. But he's not a basketball kind of guy."

Mr. Olson's and Mr. Mehta's worlds had first collided a year before the raucous party, at the time of the London International Bookfair, when Mr. Mehta received word to return to New York. It seemed that Mr. Newhouse–like Bennett Cerf before him, and Alfred A. Knopf before him–had decided to sell.

Ajai Singh (Sonny) Mehta, whose first name means "unconquered" in Sanskrit, spent his childhood in New Delhi, the son of a high-level civil servant of the newly independent India. Diplomatic leaders including Zhou Enlai and Ho Chi Minh came to the house.

Mr. Mehta read English and history at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. He married Gita Patnaik, now a novelist, in the 1960's. They have one son.

Starting out his career in London, Mr. Mehta impressed the industry by publishing both the commercial and the "literary" as head of Paladin Books and then of Pan Books, with its classy Picador line. His first triumph was The Female Eunuch , by old university pal Germaine Greer.

Author Tim Binding was an editorial director of Picador. "What made Picador work was that it didn't run on rules," said Mr. Binding. "Every book has to find its way, an individual way. Picador became a brand because you knew all the books had value. Formula wasn't what Sonny did."

Mr. Mehta carried that ethos across the Atlantic. Alberto Vitale, the then-chief executive of Random House, let him do his thing. As one publishing veteran put it, "Alberto had a certain civilized quality. Olson is pure management."

After the Bertelsmann merger was announced, members of the Knopf Publishing Group gathered in Mr. Mehta's corner office. One recalled, "He said he knew these guys, and they were good guys and cared about books, and they wanted us to keep doing what we're doing. I didn't believe him. But I thought, look, if he can deal with this, we have a responsibility to deal with it, too, and not panic."

But Mr. Mehta didn't have time to panic. In fall 1998, news began to trickle out that the Knopf Group's prized trade paperback imprint, Vintage Books, would be merging with Anchor Books, the trade paperback imprint of Doubleday, part of what used to be Bertelsmann's Bantam Doubleday Dell Group. Most saw it as a classic power grab on Mr. Mehta's part. Knopf insiders contend it was Mr. Mehta's attempt to change something before something was changed for him. This spring, Mr. Mehta told his team, "We're going to be doing Anchor," and finished the meeting with, "Let's hope you don't fuck it up." Then he went to lunch with Peter Olson, after which Mr. Olson spoke with the staff. He explained that henceforth Vintage, a $100 million imprint, would have first dibs on the best books in the entire company. "In a family," said Mr. Olson, "you don't like to have a favorite child, but sometimes you do." He added that Mr. Mehta would let him know if the other divisions got out of line.

"I welcomed it," said Mr. Mehta. "Trade publishing has been a part of my life since my late 20's and a complete passion of mine. I'm very proud of what Vintage has done." Clearly, it was a vote of confidence for Mr. Mehta, known worldwide as a trade paperback wonder boy. But what about his beloved hard-cover imprint?

One night at the end of September, Mr. Mehta stepped from an elevator into a tiny space with a single large door. He led a visitor into his home. Bookcases stretched to the ceiling against lemony walls. In a library-like sitting room, the shelves were so crammed, from Balzac to Ian McEwan, it was difficult to unwedge a book. Of the 10,000 or so volumes in this part of his home, one that Mr. Mehta likes to show off is a 1933 limited edition of Tropical Winter , by house author Joseph Hergesheimer. The pages are an electric salmon pink. "That Alfred A.," said Mr. Mehta. "He could really do it."

Mr. Mehta has spent much of his time in this room, with a glass of wine, a pack of cigarettes and a manuscript. In the early hours of Aug. 13, he woke with something wrong in his chest. First he telephoned his doctor, then his wife Gita, who was in London, where they keep a second home. He went to the hospital .

Knopf tried to keep the news quiet, but Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum gave a statement to the New York Post 's Keith Kelly. Mr. Mehta's colleagues were not pleased. "Stuart proved he doesn't have the class and the finesse that Knopf does," said one Knopf Group insider.

After Mr. Mehta was out of surgery, Mr. Olson's first impulse was to dash over to Knopf. Knopf's top brass dissuaded him. "We sort of thought it was like Al Haig: 'I'm in charge here,'" said a Knopf Group member.

When Mr. Mehta returned to his office two and a half months later, new wall-to-wall gray carpeting had replaced the smoke-choked version. "We gave him his space," said one staff member. "We knew he didn't want any attention."

Mr. Mehta poured a glass of wine and sat in an armchair. He slipped his foot from a Belgian loafer and placed it on the table. Above his ankle, the skin was puffy. "They took the veins from my left leg," he explained. He played with his small black cigarette holder. He's down to two a day, "to keep the memory alive."

What is it like, being bought?

"It's a shock," said Mr. Mehta. "One day you're minding your own business, the next day you're somebody else's business. It's the first time it's happened to me."

He talked a bit about reading. "There was a time when every book was neither a good book nor a bad book, when I read as a civilian. When they cease to surprise or cease to excite, it'll be time to go. It doesn't come with quite the rush–I suppose it's sentimental to feel this way about the past."

A doorbell rang and in walked Daniel Halpern, a poet and a co-founder in 1971 of the Ecco Press, which Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins purchased in February. The two men talked about a new novel by a 31-year-old writer named Nomi Eve. Knopf had just paid $525,000, outbidding Ecco for the book, a history of a Jewish family. "The voice is very fresh," said Mr. Mehta. "It's the kind of thing we'll do well with."

"How much higher would you have gone?" said Mr. Halpern. Mr. Mehta demurred and rose to take a call from playwright Wendy Wasserstein, whom he was meeting before the opera the next night.

"Under Si, it was a holiday," said Mr. Halpern. "Now …" He trailed off, and instead told a tale about Mr. Mehta. In 1996, Ecco was having cash flow problems. "Sonny called from the car on the way to the airport to see if he could call some people to help," said Mr. Halpern. "He had his financial guy help us go over our numbers. He basically did everything he could to help Ecco survive as independent press," said Mr. Halpern. Now people are watching to see if Ecco might have more cash to spend than Knopf.

Mr. Mehta ambled back from the kitchen bearing a new bottle of wine. "I had this in London," he said. It was a South African red called "Faithful Hound."

Mr. Mehta spends a good deal of time in England. "I fully intend to indulge my enthusiasm for England by visiting it as frequently as possible," he said. "And people at Knopf may take a petition saying, 'We don't want the old fart back.'"

To understand why Mr. Mehta's heart attack sent shock waves through a certain swath of the industry, it helps to think in terms of small graces. For instance, back in March, the poetry community lost distinguished editor and book designer Harry Ford. Mr. Mehta sent a note around the Knopf Group that described Mr. Ford as a man who was "always there for his poets and their books and for poetry … a gentleman of the old school and a connoisseur of fine food, fine wine and a life well lived."

"Harry will be replaced," said Mr. Mehta. Knopf turns little if any profit on its poetry books, most of which are sheet-fed (instead of roll-fed) at the Stinehour Press, a letterpress printer in Lunenburg, Vt. Four months before Mr. Ford's passing, John Updike, upon receiving the 1998 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, called Mr. Ford a "perfect knight of the print world." Mr. Updike's address was bound into a pamphlet and sent to 5,000 "friends" of the author and publisher along with a note from Mr. Mehta. It cost Knopf a little over $5,000 to produce.

"It's like saying, 'Here's something important that goes outside what we normally do,'" said Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, in Miami. "That's the kind of thing that Sonny has done over the years, which has drawn him closer to independent booksellers."

"Sonny and all our editors in chief have been interested in the design aspects of publishing, in keeping that tradition alive," said Virginia Tan, design director of Alfred A. Knopf. "Sonny cares deeply about the looks of the books. It emanates from the top on down."

Outside Mr. Mehta's 21st-floor office on a recent afternoon, Knopf senior editor Robin Desser and a visitor were discussing a book she had edited, a memoir called The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife , by Mary Allen. It's about Ms. Allen's hopeless love for a handsome, witty carpenter given to alcohol and drugs. He commits suicide before the two are to be married, and she tries to contact him in the afterlife. Like so many of Knopf's 150 books published this year, it hasn't received a whole lot of attention. It had a first printing of 25,000 copies, and sold 15,000. But Ms. Desser had thought it belonged on the Knopf list, and Mr. Mehta agreed.

"A lot of decisions when it comes to acquisitions at other places are done by committee," said Ms. Desser, who also edited the best-selling Memoirs of a Geisha . "It's not so easy to find an environment where you're given the freedom to go in and say, 'I have this very strange thing, here's why I want to do it, here's how I think we should do it, what do you think?'

"Sonny doesn't think like a corporate drone," Ms. Desser said. "I'm fortunate in that, rightly or wrongly, I feel protected from this corporate environment by this very creative person whose own creativity hasn't diminished."

Mr. Mehta appeared in the doorway to join the discussion. The visitor said, "Sonny, this book is about unrequited love."

He leaned into the jamb. "Aren't all books?" he said.