The length and complexity of the memo—written by RHPG’s president and publisher Gina Centrello—said it all: This reorganization really hurt, and a lot of people from the group are losing their jobs.

While Ms. Centrello did not specify how many positions would be eliminated in her memo, she did acknowledge the need for staff cuts and devoted a paragraph to expressing gratitude to those who have been let go. Notably, such a paragraph did not appear in analogous memos sent out yesterday by Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta or Crown president Jenny Frost. Asked whether this difference in approach signaled that cuts at the Random House group were more extensive than they had been at the other two divisions, Ms. Schneider said it does not.

"We always do that," Ms. Schneider said. "It's a courtesy to people who have left the company."

As far as who those people are: several sources said Judy Sternlight, an editor at Random House's Modern Library who recently worked on Peter Matthiessen’s National Book Award-winning novel Shadow Country, has been laid off.

Ms. Schneider would not confirm or deny this or any other specific staff change, but noted that control of the Modern Library list—previously under the jurisdiction of RHPG trade paperbacks publisher Jane von Mehren—is being handed over to recently appointed Little Random editor-in-chief Susan Kamil as Ms. von Mehren’s job expands to include oversight of trade paperback operations for Bantam and Spiegel & Grau (mass market at Bantam and Ballantine will be run by Nita Taublib and Libby McGuire, respectively).

Ms. Schneider said that John Flicker, who has been editing non-fiction at Bantam and running its classics line, is moving over to Modern Library as a senior editor and will report to Ms. Kamil. Asked whether the staffing changes at Modern Library—the once-proud classics line that Bennet Cerf ran for two years before opening Random House in 1927—indicate that the character of the books published through the imprint will change, Ms. Schneider said that Mr. Flicker has the background to maintain the brand. She added that most curatorial decisions are made in collaboration with the authors who make up Modern Library's advisory board, which includes Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more than a dozen others.

Among the others laid off at the Random House group as part of today’s reorganization is Bruce Tracy, the widely admired editorial director of Ballantine’s Villard imprint. When asked whether Villard would continue as an independent imprint within Random House, Ms. Schneider stressed that she could not confirm the elimination of Mr. Tracy’s position but said that the Villard imprint will continue to exist regardless of whether there are editors dedicated to acquiring for its list.

"No imprint is being eliminated," Ms. Schneider said. "All of our editors feed all of our imprints. Libby McGuire continues as publisher of Ballantine Books, which incorporates Villard as well as several other imprints. We will continue to publish under the Villard imprint."

Other editors laid off as part of today’s reorganization are Anika Streitfeld—who was brought over to Ballantine after she discovered Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, and more recently worked on Amanda Ward’s How to Be Lost—and Liz Scheier, an editor who specializes in sci-fi and genre fiction and who joined Del Ray in the spring of 2007.

Cuts also took place elsewhere in the company—at least one person was laid off in the art department—but the specifics of those changes could not be confirmed.

Finally, while Paul Bogaards, the publicity director at Knopf, emphasized to reporters yesterday that the reorganization in his division would not require editors there to reduce the number of titles published every year, Ms. Schneider said she could not rule it out for RHPG.

"Our answer to that is too early to tell about title counts," she said. "Those decisions are going to be made over time by each of our publishers."

Full text of the memo from Gina Centrello below:

Much, much more on this soon, but for now, the basics:

—Doubleday's flagship imprint and its Nan A. Talese unit will fall under the command of Sonny Mehta at Knopf.

—Crown will incorporate Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion, and WaterBrook Multnomah, with Crown publisher Jenny Frost presiding over all of them.

—Gina Centrello at Random House group will get Susan Kamil's Dial Press, previously the literary imprint of Bantam Dell, and Spiegel & Grau, the division of Doubleday launched last year and nurtured by Steve Rubin.

—Mr. Dohle in his memo said he is "currently in discussions" with Mr. Rubin "about creating a new role for him at Random House, Inc., working directly with me."

Full text of Mr. Dohle's memo below:

MARKUS DOHLE

CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD OF BERTELSMANN AG

December 3, 2008

Dear Random House Colleagues:

I am writing today to tell you about a new publishing structure and a new leadership team for the adult trade divisions at Random House, Inc. here in the U.S., effective immediately. After looking closely and extensively at our organization and its rich diversity of authors and resources, we have created a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company. It will maximize our growth potential in these challenging economic times and beyond.

The new structure will augment the exceptional publishing programs of the Random House, Knopf and Crown divisions and draw on the veteran leadership of Gina Centrello, Sonny Mehta and Jenny Frost, respectively.

The Random House Publishing Group, under the leadership of President and Publisher Gina Centrello, will expand to include the imprints of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, including The Dial Press, along with Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau.

The Knopf Publishing Group, led by Chairman Sonny Mehta, will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group.

The Crown Publishing Group, under the direction of President and Publisher Jenny Frost, will expand to include the other imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group—Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah.

As a result of this reorganization, Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin, two colleagues who have dedicated many years of service as the publishers of Bantam Dell and Doubleday respectively, will step down from their positions as announced in the accompanying memos.

Within the new Random House Publishing Group, Ballantine, Bantam Dell and Random House will continue to have separate editorial departments. Random House, true to its heritage as the flagship imprint, will continue to publish its diverse list of distinguished and bestselling fiction and nonfiction in hardcover and trade paperback. The addition of The Dial Press and Spiegel & Grau will make this group an even greater force in literary and high-profile publishing. Side by side, Ballantine and Bantam Dell will be a commercial powerhouse with their stellar lists of bestselling and critically acclaimed authors.

The Knopf Publishing Group will augment its enduring reputation as a leading publisher of quality nonfiction and literary fiction—and now some of the biggest names in fiction—with the addition of the flagship Doubleday and Nan A. Talese Books imprints. Collectively, Doubleday

and Knopf have more than two centuries of distinguished publishing history, and Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta is committed to supporting the great publishing traditions of their now sister imprint. The group will take on a new name, The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and the hardcovers of all their imprints will feed the extraordinary paperback lines of Vintage and Anchor Books.

The Crown Publishing Group’s unique and editorial diverse portfolio combines lifestyle and business books, along with prominent authors and branded businesses which have long dominated their nonfiction categories. The addition of Broadway as well as Doubleday’s business and religion imprints will complement and solidify these core areas of publishing strength. The group’s high-quality nonfiction and fiction frontlist programs will feed the impressive trade paperback lists of Broadway and Three Rivers Press.

I want to stress the fact that all the imprints of Random House will retain their distinct editorial identities. These imprints and all of you who support them are the creative core of our business and essential to our success.

The newly formed publishing groups will continue to bid independently in auctions. Each group will have my full support to publish autonomously, promote aggressively, and strive for more competitive advantages in the marketplace.

Through greater collaborative efforts among the publishing, marketing and sales departments, we can sharpen our priorities, market our books more effectively, and respond more quickly and directly to a constantly changing marketplace. That, in turn, will strengthen our vital partnership with our customers.

Coordinating our online marketing and growing our digital publishing business will be further priorities.

Gina, Jenny, Sonny and I will share our more specific publishing plans and organizational structure in due course.

The highly regarded Random House Children’s Books division, led by President and Publisher Chip Gibson, will continue its remarkable publishing programs without change.

We are all proud of the hundreds of years of publishing that our combined imprints represent. In order to preserve this legacy of excellence and build upon it in the future, we must continuously examine the way we do business, and the way the business is changing. Our aim is to always be a leading force in American trade book publishing.

Because of the current economic crisis, our industry is facing some of the most difficult times in publishing history. We are very fortunate to have four of the most dynamic and accomplished publishers to lead us into this new phase of our life at Random House.

I greatly value the support of all of you who care deeply about our authors and the content and quality of the books we publish. I share your commitment to publish the best books in the best way, and I am excited about the opportunities that these changes offer us. I am convinced that our new organization, drawing on our expertise and focusing on the market with a team-oriented approach, will make our great company stronger than ever before.

Sincerely,

Markus

Norton offered to preempt with an advance in the neighborhood of $400,000 if Ms. Shannon took the book off the market and sold it to the publisher right then and there. The editorial director of Dial Press, an imprint of Random House’s Bantam Dell Doubleday group, offered to pay half a million for the same privilege.

Ms. Shannon said no to both and confidently took the book to auction. Within days, according to three sources, she’d sold North American rights for a sum just shy of $1 million to Ann Godoff at the Penguin Press, gravely disappointing editors at Random House, Viking, Riverhead and elsewhere. The book was also sold to publishers in Canada, Germany and Italy, and at press time, deals were being negotiated for the U.K. and the Netherlands. The book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, is scheduled to come out in the U.S. next summer.

All of which begs the question: Who is this Reif Larsen and how did he get away with this?

Ms. Shannon, who has also represented Gary Shteyngart, Lydia Davis and Francine Prose, says it’s because the book is so good, obviously. “The fact is that it comes down to the work itself,” she wrote in an e-mail, “and in this case we are talking about a novel that is startlingly original and intelligent and well-written.”

But don’t lots of people write pretty good debut novels? Why did T.S. Spivet send all of New York publishing into a frenzy?

According to several people who saw the manuscript, it’s partly because it has lots of cute pictures in the margins. Sort of like a McSweeney’s book! Also Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which lots of people bought. “Suffice it to say, it’s very pretty,” said one person who saw it. “And original because of it.”

An editor who considered bidding on the book agreed: “He’s an interesting writer who also marries aspects of cartography, illustration and, you know, bits of diagrammatica to the narrative.”

And a literary scout summed it up: “It’s a combination of ‘It’s really good and it’s really cool to look at.’ It was one of these books that got people interested the more they saw it, not the more they heard about it. It picked up relatively slowly, but as people started laying their eyes on it, they started getting more and more excited because of the way it’s put together: all of these documents and pictures and sidebars, which not only are really neat to look at it but also contain key elements of the plot.”

No word at press time whether Mr. Larsen’s book will also come with a decoder ring, which would be really cool.

lneyfakh@observer.com

Nice theory, but it sounds too pat to me, a tad too diabolically clever for our friends at Langley. Like any argument, Mr. McCoy’s rests on the validity of the assumptions, not the vigor of the assertions; if the former prove flawed, the entire thesis collapses. And Mr. McCoy’s assumptions are very questionable indeed.

A Question of Torture is the newest addition to Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project, a left-wing series of “short, argument-driven books” that “explore[s] every facet of the developing American imperium.” Just as Regnery authors adhere to a, ahem, robustly conservative worldview, Mr. McCoy’s book comes freighted with certain preconceptions. For those who believe in the gospel according to Noam Chomsky—whose contribution, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), was the first of the A.E.P. books—the C.I.A. is assumed to be a fearsome, super-efficient outfit filled with sinister assassins, right-wing interrogators and malevolent white guys itching to take over the country (or, alternatively, other people’s countries).

Hence, in Mr. McCoy’s reading, everything this omnipresent, omniscient intel shop does must be part of a long-term plan, cunningly conceived and flawlessly executed. To that end, Mr. McCoy gamely strives to connect the C.I.A.’s “mind-control” experiments of the 1950’s with its enquiries into self-inflicted pain and sensory deprivation capsulated in the 1963 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, the Vietnam-era Phoenix program, the 1983 Honduras handbook Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, the Army’s FM 34-52: Intelligence Interrogation field guide of 1992, the post–Sept. 11 Bush administration’s legally and morally dubious memos on interrogation methods, and—capping it all as the preordained blowback from half a century’s lies—the photos snapped of Lynndie England and her debonair lover, Charles Graner, by their camera-happy pals at Abu Ghraib.

And that’s by no means all. Half-nelsoned by the A.E.P.’s ideological demands, Mr. McCoy must relate C.I.A. procedures to the growth of this “imperium” of ours—the agency needs to be representative of American power, you see, for the sake of high drama. Mr. McCoy’s a dab old hand at this sort of thing: A previous book was called The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade—the subtitle tells you all you need to know. In his latest volume, because Washington apparently provided the training and equipment, as well as “moral legitimacy,” to various regimes to torture their citizens, there is, Mr. McCoy says, “a clear correspondence between U.S. Cold War policy and the extreme state violence of the authoritarian age.” (Strangely, he doesn’t cite the role of the USSR.)

Mr. McCoy’s essential problem is that he’s trying to conjure up a Grand Unified Theory out of a myriad of disparate factors. His effort to meld this hodgepodge of reports and manuals from different eras and theaters into a single, coherent narrative sometimes leads him astray. His claim that watching The Passion of the Christ—released several weeks before the Abu Ghraib story broke—“prepared the American public for quiet acceptance of the prison photos” is silly, and he mistakes the low-budget, typically 50’s C.I.A. forays into LSD kookiness and electro-shock faddery for a systematic campaign to instill mass mind control over “whole societies.”

These errors are more amusing than alarming. More serious are the shortcuts taken to make connections that don’t actually exist. Thus, he quotes from the Honduran handbook (“successful ‘questioning’ is based upon … psychological techniques”) to prove that a 2003 memorandum by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing certain interrogation methods used “similar language.” And what was this “similar language”? “Interrogation approaches,” General Sanchez wrote, “are designed to manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation.” One bears no resemblance to the other—though both state the thuddingly obvious—but Mr. McCoy nevertheless states that “clearly, in both its design and detail, Gen. Sanchez’s memo was influenced by past C.I.A. interrogation research.”

Perhaps it was, but not necessarily. Despite Mr. McCoy’s insistence that the C.I.A. pioneered psychological “no-touch” measures of extracting information, General Sanchez could easily have picked up pointers from The Gulag Archipelago, 1984 or Darkness at Noon, all of which detail the same kinds of psyche-out games these interrogators do play. Mr. McCoy also claims the C.I.A.’s methods of “self-inflicted” pain were revolutionary, but were they really? Any Japanese P.O.W. guard or tsarist secret policeman or medieval inquisitor could have told you that making someone stand up for several hours hurts, or that depriving prisoners of sleep makes them more pliable. (The genius of torture, it seems, lies in the dull unoriginality of its practitioners down the ages.) And finally, General Sanchez is a soldier, not a spook, but if the C.I.A.’s techniques are so if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you, then how did General Sanchez hear about them? Mr. McCoy never satisfactorily explains the mode of transmission between the C.I.A. and the military. Indeed, he sometimes elides the two.

But the main failure of Mr. McCoy’s thesis lies in his habit of arguing backwards from the present. He knows how this story ends—with an Iraqi prisoner posed in a martyr’s tableau, wired-up arms outstretched and outfitted with a black Klan-like hood. Accordingly, he excavates for evidence in the past to support his presuppositions about C.I.A. omniscience and the concordant inevitability of Abu Ghraib. But the real question is, did C.I.A. officials and operatives consciously plan 50 years ahead? I suspect not.

Put another way, in the film The Luzhin Defence, we see the grandmaster staring at a chessboard as pawns advance, gambits are declined, piece takes piece, and checks are countered in super-fast-forward. From this we infer that chess whizzes like Fischer, Capablanca and Botvinnik plot out their games from the start (“mate in 17” sort of thing), whereas real chessies see two, perhaps three, moves ahead and rapidly adapt to their opponent’s tactics. Same goes with the C.I.A.: Despite Mr. McCoy’s assumptions, the agency, like any corporation or bureaucracy, operates on an ad hoc basis and reacts to external events as best it can.

Spies and their masters are not all-knowing manipulators like M and Karla and Control—though they love it when you think them so. If you do, however, then you’ve succumbed to the romanticism propagated by hack novelists and the pseudo-sophistication of A.E.P. authors. In fact, in the office they’re ordinary men in Men’s Wearhouse suits—plodders, turf-warriors and careerists, along with the usual complement of the disgruntled, the overlooked, the inept and the over-promoted—while in the field, agents and assets are too often fantasists, fabricators and nutters. Dumb mistakes and shortsighted decisions are made all the time. The C.I.A., in short, couldn’t pull off a conspiracy this complex, this long-term, this sinister if it tried.

I’ve been harsh on poor old Alfred McCoy. This is a worthwhile book, one well worth reading to balance the repulsive agit-prop of the right (“water-boarding is not torture”). And, for once, a reviewer can’t complain about a lack of sources and sloppy research. There’s a ton of interesting stuff here, and Mr. McCoy does weave a fascinating narrative, but his thesis is inherently flawed, and A Question of Torture ultimately fails to prove the case.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, which Bantam Dell will publish in April.

Nice theory, but it sounds too pat to me, a tad too diabolically clever for our friends at Langley. Like any argument, Mr. McCoy’s rests on the validity of the assumptions, not the vigor of the assertions; if the former prove flawed, the entire thesis collapses. And Mr. McCoy’s assumptions are very questionable indeed.

A Question of Torture is the newest addition to Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project, a left-wing series of “short, argument-driven books” that “explore[s] every facet of the developing American imperium.” Just as Regnery authors adhere to a, ahem, robustly conservative worldview, Mr. McCoy’s book comes freighted with certain preconceptions. For those who believe in the gospel according to Noam Chomsky—whose contribution, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), was the first of the A.E.P. books—the C.I.A. is assumed to be a fearsome, super-efficient outfit filled with sinister assassins, right-wing interrogators and malevolent white guys itching to take over the country (or, alternatively, other people’s countries).

Hence, in Mr. McCoy’s reading, everything this omnipresent, omniscient intel shop does must be part of a long-term plan, cunningly conceived and flawlessly executed. To that end, Mr. McCoy gamely strives to connect the C.I.A.’s “mind-control” experiments of the 1950’s with its enquiries into self-inflicted pain and sensory deprivation capsulated in the 1963 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, the Vietnam-era Phoenix program, the 1983 Honduras handbook Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, the Army’s FM 34-52: Intelligence Interrogation field guide of 1992, the post–Sept. 11 Bush administration’s legally and morally dubious memos on interrogation methods, and—capping it all as the preordained blowback from half a century’s lies—the photos snapped of Lynndie England and her debonair lover, Charles Graner, by their camera-happy pals at Abu Ghraib.

And that’s by no means all. Half-nelsoned by the A.E.P.’s ideological demands, Mr. McCoy must relate C.I.A. procedures to the growth of this “imperium” of ours—the agency needs to be representative of American power, you see, for the sake of high drama. Mr. McCoy’s a dab old hand at this sort of thing: A previous book was called The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade—the subtitle tells you all you need to know. In his latest volume, because Washington apparently provided the training and equipment, as well as “moral legitimacy,” to various regimes to torture their citizens, there is, Mr. McCoy says, “a clear correspondence between U.S. Cold War policy and the extreme state violence of the authoritarian age.” (Strangely, he doesn’t cite the role of the USSR.)

Mr. McCoy’s essential problem is that he’s trying to conjure up a Grand Unified Theory out of a myriad of disparate factors. His effort to meld this hodgepodge of reports and manuals from different eras and theaters into a single, coherent narrative sometimes leads him astray. His claim that watching The Passion of the Christ—released several weeks before the Abu Ghraib story broke—“prepared the American public for quiet acceptance of the prison photos” is silly, and he mistakes the low-budget, typically 50’s C.I.A. forays into LSD kookiness and electro-shock faddery for a systematic campaign to instill mass mind control over “whole societies.”

These errors are more amusing than alarming. More serious are the shortcuts taken to make connections that don’t actually exist. Thus, he quotes from the Honduran handbook (“successful ‘questioning’ is based upon … psychological techniques”) to prove that a 2003 memorandum by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing certain interrogation methods used “similar language.” And what was this “similar language”? “Interrogation approaches,” General Sanchez wrote, “are designed to manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation.” One bears no resemblance to the other—though both state the thuddingly obvious—but Mr. McCoy nevertheless states that “clearly, in both its design and detail, Gen. Sanchez’s memo was influenced by past C.I.A. interrogation research.”

Perhaps it was, but not necessarily. Despite Mr. McCoy’s insistence that the C.I.A. pioneered psychological “no-touch” measures of extracting information, General Sanchez could easily have picked up pointers from The Gulag Archipelago, 1984 or Darkness at Noon, all of which detail the same kinds of psyche-out games these interrogators do play. Mr. McCoy also claims the C.I.A.’s methods of “self-inflicted” pain were revolutionary, but were they really? Any Japanese P.O.W. guard or tsarist secret policeman or medieval inquisitor could have told you that making someone stand up for several hours hurts, or that depriving prisoners of sleep makes them more pliable. (The genius of torture, it seems, lies in the dull unoriginality of its practitioners down the ages.) And finally, General Sanchez is a soldier, not a spook, but if the C.I.A.’s techniques are so if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you, then how did General Sanchez hear about them? Mr. McCoy never satisfactorily explains the mode of transmission between the C.I.A. and the military. Indeed, he sometimes elides the two.

But the main failure of Mr. McCoy’s thesis lies in his habit of arguing backwards from the present. He knows how this story ends—with an Iraqi prisoner posed in a martyr’s tableau, wired-up arms outstretched and outfitted with a black Klan-like hood. Accordingly, he excavates for evidence in the past to support his presuppositions about C.I.A. omniscience and the concordant inevitability of Abu Ghraib. But the real question is, did C.I.A. officials and operatives consciously plan 50 years ahead? I suspect not.

Put another way, in the film The Luzhin Defence, we see the grandmaster staring at a chessboard as pawns advance, gambits are declined, piece takes piece, and checks are countered in super-fast-forward. From this we infer that chess whizzes like Fischer, Capablanca and Botvinnik plot out their games from the start (“mate in 17” sort of thing), whereas real chessies see two, perhaps three, moves ahead and rapidly adapt to their opponent’s tactics. Same goes with the C.I.A.: Despite Mr. McCoy’s assumptions, the agency, like any corporation or bureaucracy, operates on an ad hoc basis and reacts to external events as best it can.

Spies and their masters are not all-knowing manipulators like M and Karla and Control—though they love it when you think them so. If you do, however, then you’ve succumbed to the romanticism propagated by hack novelists and the pseudo-sophistication of A.E.P. authors. In fact, in the office they’re ordinary men in Men’s Wearhouse suits—plodders, turf-warriors and careerists, along with the usual complement of the disgruntled, the overlooked, the inept and the over-promoted—while in the field, agents and assets are too often fantasists, fabricators and nutters. Dumb mistakes and shortsighted decisions are made all the time. The C.I.A., in short, couldn’t pull off a conspiracy this complex, this long-term, this sinister if it tried.

I’ve been harsh on poor old Alfred McCoy. This is a worthwhile book, one well worth reading to balance the repulsive agit-prop of the right (“water-boarding is not torture”). And, for once, a reviewer can’t complain about a lack of sources and sloppy research. There’s a ton of interesting stuff here, and Mr. McCoy does weave a fascinating narrative, but his thesis is inherently flawed, and A Question of Torture ultimately fails to prove the case.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, which Bantam Dell will publish in April.

"I'm hanging up the phone in five seconds unless you change the subject," the editor said.

Stuart Applebaum, 53, the corporate spokesman for Random House Inc., the world's largest trade publisher, and his younger brother Irwyn Applebaum, 48, president of Bantam Dell Publishing Group, the biggest mass market publisher (John Grisham, Danielle Steele) and most lucrative division of Random House-have earned a distinction for themselves among their colleagues. In a time of economic turmoil and soft book sales, they represent the hard nosed, highly commercial, post-literary future of the Bertelsmann-owned company, and, in some ways, of American publishing itself.

"We don't ask our readers to pass an IQ test to buy our books," said Irwyn Applebaum. Literary and commercial, he said, were "not terribly meaningful terms."

After the ouster of Ann Godoff as president and publisher of the Random House Trade Group on Jan. 16, the brothers have fended off the accruing perception-including reported stories in The New York Times -that they helped orchestrate a coup, ushering out the decidedly "literary" Ms. Godoff and inserting their protégé, Gina Centrello, as head of the newly formed Random House Ballantine Group. The new group is a publishing centaur in which the commercial head, Ballantine, sits atop the literary body, Random House.

Those who posit an Applebaum coup make this construction: Irwyn Applebaum, the star breadwinner for Random House chief executive officer Peter Olson, resented Ms. Godoff's whiff of elitism and her large payments to authors and agents. And Stuart Applebaum penned the press release from Mr. Olson in which the CEO bluntly rebuked Ms. Godoff for "failure to meet the company's financial targets."

Publishing staffers within and outside the company have been gripped by both awe and resentment. One longtime executive at Random House Inc. told The Observer, "There's no question that they manipulated the Gina and Ann Godoff thing. They're the two most influential people on Peter's thinking. Stuart is very influential. And Irwyn is influential because he's the business role model: Bantam is extremely profitable and extremely uninteresting. That's what Peter likes."

Stuart Applebaum laughed at the whole idea.

And he laughed for Irwyn, too.

"He would get a good laugh out of that," said Stuart Applebaum. "Influential? I doubt whether Irwyn ever discusses anything in the company other than the Bantam Dell business.

"That theory," he went on, "suggests that Random House is run like a high school sorority, with an in-crowd and a concern for who's popular, which is absurd. The notion that Peter made the decision he made because of the personalities involved makes for lively reading but is pure fiction. Pure fiction."

Nevertheless, Stuart Applebaum's press release on Ms. Godoff's departure was as direct and unambiguous as a belch in a cathedral nave. Mr. Applebaum wrote it but said, "Mr. Olson knew exactly what was being said in the press release and its potential impact on the world." The company has not yet found a new editor in chief.

Irwyn Applebaum refused to discuss Ann Godoff, other than to say that theories of his own involvement in her firing are "preposterous." And he denied that he had anything to do with the rise to power of Gina Centrello, the woman he worked with for seven years at Pocket Books and who reportedly delivers pizza to his desk on his birthday each year. Mr. Applebaum was president and publisher and Ms. Centrello was a managing editor. Ms. Centrello jumped to the publishing side of the business soon after Mr. Applebaum's arrival and reportedly began to shape Ms. Centrello's identity, and she his.

"She steadied Irwyn and made him a little more palatable to the world," said one former associate of Irwyn Applebaum. "He doesn't really impress agents or authors-so you need someone in between who can put a better, more appealing face forward. At Pocket, Gina was that person."

"I learned as much from her as she did from me," Irwyn Applebaum said, taking issue with the mentor-protégé construction. As for Ms. Centrello, she said that Irwyn Applebaum "was my mentor," then agreed with him, "but I like to think we learned a lot from each other."

But might Irwyn, by virtue of his kinship with Stuart, have had at least a little inside influence on the appointment?

"I don't feel the need to discuss that," said Irwyn Applebaum. "You can safely surmise that if both of us were not the soul of discretion, we wouldn't have our high level jobs."

Stuart Applebaum, an extrovert and sound-byte expert dubbed "the consiglieri " by insiders, has been the media mouthpiece for CEOs dating back to Alberto Vitale, the Random House chief in the 1990's. Irwyn Applebaum is a self-described shut-in who eats tuna melt sandwiches at his desk and avoids cocktail parties. He is so married to Bantam Dell he married a fellow Bantam employee.

Stuart Applebaum, a lifelong bachelor, an avid dater, "cuts a wide swath" with the ladies, according to a former girlfriend, and lives on the Upper East Side. Irwyn Applebaum, a family man with a daughter, lives in the northern Westchester town of Golden's Bridge. They both stand over six feet tall and, like Harvey and Bob Weinstein, suck up a lot of oxygen when they enter a room.

While the Applebaums have attracted the resentment of many in publishing, little of it is noted outside their realm.

"I would say they're both sociophobes and have really bad social skills," said Fran McCullough, a former senior editor at Bantam Books, who left after her cookbook program was terminated by Irwyn Applebaum in 1996. Ms. McCullough, who now writes cookbooks for Scribner, called Irwyn "very smart" and a "good writer." She said "he can be very moving." But she also said she was amazed that he and his brother had "come into power," considering their personalities.

Those who know them say the Applebaums are polar opposites of celebrity publishers like Sonny Mehta, the chain-smoking, swashbuckling head of Alfred A. Knopf.

"They're very unassuming," said Elisa Petrini, a former senior editor who worked with Irwyn Applebaum at Bantam Dell for four years and once saw Stuart Applebaum romantically. "They're never going to step up and grab the spotlight. They keep their heads down."

Both Applebaum brothers would say that that's how they prefer it. Irwyn said he had recently seen "Harrison Ford on TV complaining how terrible it is to be popular-it's not something I've ever sought out. On the other hand, if I had his looks and talent, perhaps it would be different."

But the Applebaum brothers make up for it in other ways. "Their focus is constantly on business, so they catch people off guard," said one former Bantam associate, who declined to be named. "The stakes are not that high in book publishing, but to them it's life and death, every day, and they wage their business like war."

Ms. Petrini called the Applebaum brothers "absolutely fascinating." She cited their sense of loyalty. "They are a little Sicilian in that respect," said Ms. Petrini. "I think if you piss off Irwyn, the door is going to be shut, that's it. You could get back in his good graces, but it wouldn't be easy."

The brothers are pop culture junkies. They achieved huge success with movie tie-in books and celebrity biographies at Bantam Books in the late 1970's. In 1984, Irwyn Applebaum wrote The World According to Beaver , a fan book for Leave It to Beaver devotees. Nevertheless, said Fran McCullough, "he believes very strongly that he has very amazing literary gifts, that he can run with the big boys on the literary stuff."

The Dial Press, a literary imprint that is a division of Bantam Dell, is seen as Irwyn Applebaum's pet literary patina project-a sort of personal hedge against the crass commercial material he makes so much money on. It is run by editor in chief Susan Kamil.

"He's been extremely careful about making Susan happy, letting her have her head," said Ms. McCullough.

"He was supportive of me, and continues to be," said Ms. Kamil, a former Simon & Schuster editor who, like Ms. Centrello, met Irwyn Applebaum at Pocket in the mid-80's.

But Irwyn Applebaum doesn't believe in losing money simply for the cause of literature. As Ms. Petrini put it, "As long as you're making money, you don't argue with success. I think it is the loyalty thing he trusts."

Would Irwyn Applebaum trust a woman like Ann Godoff? "I don't think Irwyn is into any kind of snob," Ms. Petrini said.

"I think he's a populist at heart," Fran McCullough said. "He's very thrilled to have Stephen Hawking on his list; at the same time, he wants all his editors to read People magazine. His time is coming. This is what publishing is turning in to."

"I can never remember encouraging anyone to read People magazine. Magazines, yes," said Irwyn Applebaum. "I certainly read People every week."

As a result of Irwyn Applebaum's sense of publishing as a business and not a cultural foundation-and his stated distaste for the sort of high pay outs that Ms. Godoff was accused of making-he's not popular with high-profile agents. "If we can do business, great," he said, but "I don't know of any responsible editor or publisher who would make a deal because they were friends of the agent. It's not about the agents, it's about the authors."

Without invoking her name, Irwyn Applebaum seemed to be referring to Ms. Godoff, who worked closely with Suzanne Gluck, a William Morris literary agent, and Esther Newberg, senior vice president of ICM. Irwyn Applebaum then added, "I believe that all the publishers within the Random House group who have survived are putting most of their energy behind books and not into some social pecking order."

Esther Margolis, a Bantam executive from 1963 to 1980 and now the president of independent publisher Newmarket Press, may be the person most responsible for conjuring up the Applebaum brothers. Ms. Margolis hired them at Bantam Books: Stuart in 1974, Irwyn in 1976. They all served under Oscar Dystel, the patriarch of Bantam and godfather of the modern paperback business, who retired in 1980.

Ms. Margolis recalled Stuart as a bright if "rough" kid, who had been reading Publishers Weekly and Variety every week since he 16. He had worked under Jane Friedman at Alfred A. Knopf in 1971, then did a stint in the movies, at MGM. "Stuart was very smart and very focused and his goal was to be the best publicist in New York," she said. "I tried very hard to induct him into a more socially acceptable way. He had a socially awkward characteristic. Irwyn was a very different personality."

Early in Stuart Applebaum's career, said Ms. Margolis, he instilled a certain wariness among his colleagues. "People...would say to me, 'You hired Stuart Applebaum ?'" she said. Her colleagues had the same reaction when Ms. Margolis brought Irwyn into the mix. "I suggested Irwyn to [associate publisher] Rena Wolner. Her first reaction was, 'You want me to see Stuart's brother ?' No, no, he's nothing like Stuart!"

Irwyn Applebaum, graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 1976, then started off as a temporary secretary to the publisher, eventually editing the westerns of Louis L'Amour. He did 21 of L'Amour's books, with Stuart as publicist, before jumping to Pocket Books, the mass market division of Simon & Schuster, in 1985. During the Applebaums' early years at Bantam, Ms. Margolis said she made it her job to steam and press the Applebaums' image.

"I would hope they would give me some credit for their careers," said Ms. Margolis, who said she remains friendly with Irwyn-they recently saw each other at the 90th birthday party of Mr. Dystel. But Stuart, she said, terminated their friendship after he took over her job as head of publicity at Bantam in 1980. "It saddened me, it really saddened me," she said. "What I didn't realize until after I was gone and people said different things to me, I didn't realize how mean he was. So that upset me. I had basically given him an opportunity to hurt people. That made me feel bad. He's a singular talent. I'm sure he's a very lonely person."

Said Stuart Applebaum: "I appreciate Esther's having hired me. We've gone our separate ways. I prefer not to discuss it."

Later, he added, "I have no animus and only appreciation for my work under her a long time ago. I know those who see life as an extended Camus novel would take issues there, but there are none in my mind." As for Irwyn Applebaum, he said of Ms. Margolis, "I would not say we're friends-we're not enemies-we just don't have much to do with one another."

Both brothers were probably influenced more by Alberto Vitale, one-time CEO of Bantam Dell and eventually the CEO of Random House Inc., often called "The General." "Alberto would call you into his office," said one of his former employees, "and say, 'Keep your eyes open and if you think there's anything of interest to me'-in terms of behavior of people, something undermining to him-'tell me about it.' That was the way the company started to evolve."

Mr. Vitale said that "input from the rank and file was very important to me," that "the people in the trenches know what's going on in the company." But former associates said Stuart Applebaum took to that quasi-paranoid style-keeping his eyes peeled for palace intrigue-and flourished.

"Stuart has operated from behind the scenes and put on this face, 'Oh, I'm only a PR guy,'" said the former Bantam associate. "But he's been involved in every, every decision."

In 1982, Stuart got involved in a very public book acquisition, nabbing Lee Iaccoca for the best-selling memoir, Iaccoca: A Memoir . He had met Mr. Iaccoca through their mutual barber, Gio Hernandez, a man who eventually threatened to sue Bantam for an agenting fee, but backed down when a company attorney turned on the heat. Regardless, the affair embarrassed Stuart and he never branched out from his job as spokesman again. Still, he looked back wistfully on the book's sales: seven million copies.

"I wish I could find a few more books like that," he said. "I wish the business had a few more books like that."

The Applebaums' loyalty has varied over the years. Steve Rubin, the publisher of Doubleday-Broadway Publishing Group, had been part of the close-knit early years at Bantam Dell, working with Oscar Dystel. And at Doubleday, Mr. Rubin had cut a deal with Irwyn Applebaum to publish the mass market paperback version of The Program, by Stephen White. According to a Random House executive familiar with the situation, Irwyn stole Mr. White away to Bantam Dell.

Mr. White "wanted to change publishers and we had a hard-soft deal with him," said Irwyn Applebaum, "it was his decision to request that he go hard-soft with the Bantam Dell group. And Doubleday agreed." Mr. Rubin declined to comment, but the Random House executive said Mr. Rubin "was livid. It caused much bad blood."

And Alberto Vitale was said to have been stunned by his cold treatment by the Applebaums-particularly Stuart-when he departed the company in 1998. Reached for comment, Mr. Vitale called both brothers "extraordinarily talented." But he also said the Applebaums rarely spoke to him again after his departure.

"When I left, during all my tenure at Random House, I had a very close relationship with Stuart Applebaum," Mr. Vitale said. "After that, it was reduced to a trickle, if that much." As for Irwyn Applebaum, Mr. Vitale said they were still friends, but "we never saw each other for lunch or breakfast.

"What it says about them," Mr. Vitale said, "is they are either very, very busy or they only pay attention to the business or they are not very smart at keeping relationships even after one is with the company-take your pick."

But starting in 1999, the year he turned 50, Stuart Applebaum may have begun making some efforts to reform and rekindle old relationships. That year, he donated $100,000 to the Queensborough Public Library, and later another $100,000 to the library at Queens College, from which he graduated in 1971. He dedicated the latter gift to the memory of a third Applebaum brother, Edward, who died in the late 90's.

That same year, on his 50th birthday, Sept. 19, Stuart threw himself a party. Irwyn booked the restaurant-Quatorze on East 79th Street-and Stuart put together the 50-head guest list, a who's who of publishing: Mr. Olson; Phyllis Grann, then-CEO of Penguin Putnam; Ms. Centrello; Mr. Rubin; and Mr. Vitale.

At the end of the evening, Mr. Applebaum handed each of his guests an envelope: Inside was a note that declared that $1,000 had been donated to their favorite charity in their name.

It was a powerful expression of what he wanted to be, and wanted to be seen as.

"Over the months that led up to it," said Stuart Applebaum, "I discreetly asked them what were some of the charitable endeavors in which they participated." He invited "people who had made a difference in my life over the years. I wanted to give something on their behalf to a larger world."