A single person clapped and, realizing they were all alone, stopped.

Mr. Shanks continued, “It exudes the grandeur of Gotham and the dazzle of the iconic Mad Men design gone modern.” Mr. Shanks cleared his throat. “It’s really amazing.”

Last Monday, a group (of “top hotel and publishing executives as well as media industry influencers,” per a press release) was gathered at a private party to celebrate the grand reopening of the gut-renovated hotel and the launch of its new partnership with Penguin Books.

Scheduled to coincide with Book Expo America, a massive publishing trade show that forces attendees to trudge all the way to 11th Ave., three evening readings and panels were to take place in the lobby.

These readings, called the Penguin Preview Series at the Round Table, will continue on a quarterly basis. Another aspect of the new partnership is the Night-table Reading promotion, in which books and galleys from Penguin’s recent releases will be distributed to hotel guests each night.

It’s all a concerted effort to reclaim the “rich literary history” (a phrase repeated ad nauseum through the night) of the hotel, where, during the 1920s, the Algonquin Round Table met for lunch to exchange jokes and barbs, where The New Yorker was born in 1925, and where Dorothy Parker said that thing about leading a horticulture (you can’t make her think).

Penguin authors abounded: Elizabeth Gilbert, Ron Chernow and Simon Doonan milled around, Rachel Dratch chatted with John Hodgman in another corner, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who dropped by on the late side.

We asked Mr. Hodgman if a literary salon could be revived in this way. Can there be another Algonquin Round Table?

“Salon culture still exists, but it’s online now. Writers don’t need to get together in an actual place any more,” Mr. Hodgman mused. “Though writers would benefit from a meeting place, because there would be alcohol and table service. Writers love hotels because they are the living rooms they cannot afford themselves.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz responded to the same question with characteristic flourish, but no optimism. “An incubator for personalities supremely attuned to this socio-cultural moment—it would be a wonderful thing for human circuitry. But communities have diffused and moved into the thinnest splinters,” he said.

Marion Meade, biographer of Algonquin patron sinner Dorothy Parker, clutched a glass of white wine with both hands, and proudly gestured toward one of her books, displayed in a glass cabinet in the lobby.

When asked if the spirit of the place could be revived simply by hosting readings and stuffing a new novel next to the Bible in each bedside drawer, Ms. Meade replied with an acerbic pragmatism.

“They are probably the only hotel in New York that has this kind of literary history. If they don’t use it, they’re pretty stupid, and they’re not stupid. Whether they can keep it up with Penguin, who knows, but I give them credit for trying.”

What would Dorothy Parker think of this latest campaign to capitalize upon the hotel’s literary pedigree?

“She’d think it was bullshit,” came the answer.

This time last year, Mr. Shinker said, he’d been looking forward to a week of golf with a group of publishing buddies who had been gathering the week after BookExpo America every summer since 1998 for a friendly tournament known as the Publishers’ Cup. The plan this year was to play Maidstone in the Hamptons, but then the eight guys on the European team bailed, saying they thought flying over would be viewed as an inappropriate extravagance. Mr. Shinker was bummed. As his teammate Peter Workman explained it later, “The European team was governed by fear, so they did not show up.”

The day before, ex-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman was spotted wearing dark glasses and taking diligent notes at a Chris Andersen talk on “where venture capital dollars are flowing and what it means for publishers.” Ms. Friedman, who was forced out of HarperCollins a few days after last year’s BEA, said she had spent the past year thinking about how the industry will “have to reinvent itself for the future” and was “excited about something” that she was not yet ready to announce.

On the main exhibition floor, Bob Miller from HarperStudio could be heard telling someone that it was “time to make lemonade out of lemons.” David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, said he’d been surprised at the “rapidity of collapse” the industry had suffered since last summer. “Even if you tend to look at the doomy side of things, you expect the ship to sink slowly and not hit an iceberg,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

BookExpo America in 2009 added up to this: The publishing industry needs a hero, and there is no shortage of activists and pundits vying for the role. Some of them self-identify as innovators, choosing cheerily to interpret the tumultuous state of the book business as a chance to have fun and come up with lots of new ideas. Others prefer to be seen as radicalized publishing veterans who have had enough, and who have undertaken new, independent ventures with the intention of playing by their own rules. Others still are consultants who sell scary visions of a future in which digital publishing defeats print and all content becomes equal in the eyes of readers scrolling through feeds on their iPhones. 

The discouraging thing is that many of these would be saviors at BookExpo seemed to believe that the whole industry must be torn down before a new future can be paved—that books as they currently exist will have to morph into some other form of “content” that is more compatible with emerging reading habits.

And then there was John Freeman, the diligent, stubborn book lover who seemed to be operating at BookExpo under the assumption that reading culture will not change as much as some excitable prophets want to believe.

Mr. Freeman isn’t exactly poised to be a hero, and he’s not a bigwig at a house or a power agent. But in his various roles—editor, prolific book critic, ardent reader, former president of the National Book Critics Circle—he provides a kind of cold comfort to the industry, a steady and measured voice arguing that maybe not everything has to change, that simply loving to read and loving books could be enough to keep book publishing as it exists going a little bit longer.

Last Thursday, Mr. Freeman was named acting editor of the British literary journal Granta, a new role for him that reflects an unexpected promotion following the abrupt exit of previous editor Alex Clark. Some might see him as an unlikely leader for a publication that began in 1889 as the student literary magazine of Cambridge University and whose mission since being revived in 1979 by Bill Buford has been to discover and propel unknown writers to literary stardom. First of all, his editing experience is limited to the time he’s clocked since December as Granta’s American editor. Second, as seemingly every other magazine and journal tries to find ways to innovate, and draw readers by Twittering and starting Facebook groups, Mr. Freeman’s approach is decidedly old school: As American editor of Granta, he has gone around the country visiting M.F.A. programs and English departments telling aspiring writers about his magazine, giving out discounted subscriptions and encouraging everyone to submit their work.

Surely all of those pundits and forecasters at BEA would chide his charmingly simple efforts to promote books and reading to the public, but Mr. Freeman has a track record of beating the odds. Before joining Granta, he spent 10 years earning a living as a freelance book critic, building himself into a well-oiled one-man business that brought reliable returns even as space for book reviews grew ever more scarce. Where other literary-minded young people ditched the freelance life for the comfier confines of grad school, or finally took that dreaded copyediting job, Mr. Freeman was managing to write as many as five book reviews and author profiles per week and placing them with six, seven, eight newspapers at a time. At one point, he says he was receiving 50 books in the mail every day and racking up regular bylines in 200 publications worldwide. In 2007 he became the president of the National Book Critics Circle and launched an expertly publicized campaign to raise awareness about the shrinking amount of space that American newspapers were devoting to book reviews. And yes, he actually got people to care about this stuff.

“I read and write fast, and work six to seven days a week sometimes,” he said on Friday morning at Soho House after staying up all night working on proofs for the next issue of Granta. “Ultimately you can get a lot of reading done if you have no other job. And that’s what I did—I read books and wrote about them.”

In the process, Mr. Freeman became the ultimate generalist, writing solid if not always revelatory pieces on fiction, history, poetry and anything else he felt like.

“Each newspaper I wrote for had a slightly different idea of what my specialty was, which kind of forced me to not have one,” Mr. Freeman said. “The San Francisco Chronicle would always assign me books by writers either in translation or not from the U.S. I ended up doing a fair number of local Ohio writers for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. There was a paper I wrote for, I forget which one, where I was doing lots of sport books. I reviewed for Entertainment Weekly, where I’d do lighter fiction. I just like to read, so I didn’t mind. I think ultimately specialties are kind of dangerous.”

Review editors and book publicists alike loved him; he was versatile, reliable and, most importantly, a fan. And while the reviews Mr. Freeman wrote never added up to any particular view of what great writing should be or signaled a consistent operating aesthetic, their frequency and ubiquity—along with his irrepressible participation in New York literary life—earned him an unmistakable reputation as an open-minded, energetic reader.

“I think the thing that strikes me about John is that he really loves books!” said the literary agent Julie Barer. “Like, I didn’t know him very well and I had a breakfast with him a couple of months ago, and we spent three hours just talking about books. Literary fiction, science fiction, John Updike, contemporary young writers … I don’t know his taste well enough to know what he likes, but he’s one of those readers who is just always hungry for great work.”

What remains to be seen is whether the fact of his broad palette makes him the perfect editor for Granta—one who will cast a wide net for new writers from many disciplines—or a confused one without a clear curatorial mission.

“I could not from serving with him on the board of the NBCC formulate a particular idea of what he likes—it seemed all over the map to me,” said Salon.com book critic and former books editor Laura Miller. “He has definite likes and dislikes as far as books go, though... so maybe if he has more say over what he’s doing [now that he’s not catering to the whims of newspaper editors], his taste will emerge. It is kind of a big question mark: When he’s free to exercise his taste at will, what will Granta look like?”

Mr. Freeman’s biggest asset, Ms. Miller said, might be his manifest knack for connecting with people and attracting attention. As the freelance publicist Kimberly Burns put it, “He is everywhere!” Or, in the words of his longtime girlfriend, the literary agent Nicole Aragi, “He’s got a little bit of community organizer in him. He’s good at bringing people together, and giving them the energy to do more than complain.”

It helps that Mr. Freeman believes in the inevitability of books—even if, as he will lay out in his forthcoming manifesto for Scribner, The Tyranny of E-Mail, the Internet is engendering in the people who use it habits that distract them from reading. This is the salve he has to offer a chapped and chafing industry. As people cry doom, he’s there to hold hands and assure them that it’s not that bad.

“I couldn’t do this job or the National Book Critics Circle job or the job of the critic if I didn’t believe fundamentally that there’s a fighting chance for keeping the experience of reading at the center of human life,” he said. Nevertheless, he believes that some of the discussions that took place at Book Expo—namely the ones about how long-form narrative will disappear as readers grow more and more accustomed to absorbing information in bits and pieces—will one day seem ridiculous.

“People are always going to read,” he said. “People love to read, and there are lots and lots of readers. … They have an instinctual, perhaps even biological desire for narrative. We can corrupt or pollute or whatever verb you’d like to use that desire with our popular culture, but ultimately there will be desire for storytelling.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

For a moment, Mr. Auster looked at the questioner blankly. “But it’s not a children’s book,” he said. Perhaps she had gotten confused, because the story is told from the perspective of a dog named Mr. Bones?

The woman insisted that she knew what she was talking about—that the book she was referring to was an adaptation, published with full illustrations and packaged as a kids’ book. Mr. Auster said it was the first he'd ever heard of such a thing.

Sherman Alexie, who was also on the panel, asked Mr. Auster if that’s what happens when you write 40 books. Smiling tentatively, Mr. Auster deferred to his literary agent, Carol Mann, who was seated a few rows away from the woman who’d brought the matter up. Ms. Mann indicated she was not aware of a Timbuktu for kids either, and promised to look into it. 

At that point, Picador publicist James Meader, who works on Mr. Auster's paperbacks, submitted in a somewhat sheepish tone that he had a copy of the book in his office, and would send one to him directly. Soon someone in the audience had Googled the book on her iPhone, and raised her hand to share her findings. "It has a gray fluffy dog on the cover looking over its shoulder," she reported.

Had Picador published a Paul Auster book without telling him or paying for the privilege? That’s kind of what it seemed like!

Asked for her reaction after the panel, Ms. Mann said only that she was astonished, and was looking forward to sorting it out.

But no. As Mr. Meader later explained to The Observer,  Picador had had nothing to do with the mysterious book, which had in fact been published by a small German company called Minedition. "It’s kind of a macabre idea for a children’s book," Mr. Meader said, "Because as you may know, the dog does commit suicide at the end."

In an interview today, Ms. Mann said she had gotten in touch with Minedition and that contracts and copies of the book—which is distributed by Penguin in the USA—are on their way to Ms. Mann’s office. Turns out a computer crash was to blame!

"It’s not really a big deal if that’s what you’re thinking," Ms. Mann said. "It was a labor of love by a German packager-publisher, and they came to us with illustrations and an abridgement and then they disappeared. We had looked at it—Paul completely forgot about it but he had seen it, we both had. Apparently this little company’s computer server went down and the computer crashed so all of our back and forth was lost."

"There’s absolutely no duplicity!" she clarified.

Oh, well.

We’ll have our own account in this Wednesday’s paper, but in the meantime, a sampling of coverage from elsewhere:

The best summary of the weekend by far appears on the online industry bulletin Publisher’s Lunch. Site manager Michael Cader describes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s disappointing Friday, writing in what is uncharacteristically vivid and impassioned language that he “showed himself as bold enough and strong enough to show up in front of the industry that launched his enterprise and stick a big fat thumb directly in their eyes. And perhaps so lost in his own world that maybe he didn't realize how insulting it was to offer book professionals (and booksellers who compete with him) a warmed-over version of the Kindle pitch he's been making since last fall as if no one had heard of the device.”

Cader also reports that hundreds of catering staff walked off the job on Saturday as part of labor dispute with their company, forcing the show’s organizers to pick up the trays and bring them around to all the author lunches themselves. Also he went to the Prince show! He notes there were lots of tall ladies there wearing napkins, and also Babyface was there.

In Publisher’s Weekly, veteran publishing reporter Jim Milliot reports lower-than-normal attendance and quotes an anonymous publisher as saying it was a “fair fair.” Some more on that in the LA Times, which calls the whole thing “subdued.”

And in the Times, Hollywood reporter Ed Wyatt pinch hits for regular books reporter Motoko Rich and files a story focusing on the Kindle as a source of industry anxiety. He quotes Simon & Schuster chair Carolyn Reidy and Penguin CEO David Shanks as saying that e-books are selling way better than they used to, and a bookseller as saying that their growing popularity is a threat to his business. In the AP, Hillel Italie has Mr. Shanks saying, "I think when this is over, we're going to do some soul searching. There are people in this hall who have spent way more than a million dollars at a time when we all should be pinching pennies."

“All done,” said Ms. Plame.

She was interrupted by applause.

It was lunchtime at the annual BookExpo America, and a large crowd of booksellers, publishers, and publicists had paid $50 each to eat chicken-ala-something and listen to a panel of authors talk about their new books.

Alan Alda had kicked things off. Paul Krugman was on deck. Russell Simmons was closing. Now the podium belonged to Ms. Plame.

She was wearing a blue blazer over a white top. She explained that she and her husband Joseph Wilson had recently relocated from Washington D.C. to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ever since the move, she had been spending a lot of time unpacking books. “We had 12,000 pounds of household goods,” said Ms. Plame. “And six thousand of them were books.”

Ms. Plame recently finished writing a book of her own, entitled Fair Game, which Simon & Schuster plans to publish in October of 2007
(and for which they reportedly paid $2 million).

“It’s a memoir of my career with the CIA,” said Ms. Plame. “I was proud to serve my country. I was loyal. I loved my career. It was exciting. And I got to do something I thought was meaningful.”

All of which famously came to an end in the summer of 2003 when her name and professional occupation—which turned out to be classified information--was leaked to the media. Just exactly how that leak took place has since become fodder for investigations criminal and otherwise, as well as tens of thousands of news stories, endless talk show punditry, and the eventual felony conviction of vice-presidential advisor I. Lewis Libby.

Ms. Plame told the audience that she had enjoyed the process of writing Fair Game.

“For the first time I got to go through the events that have happened to me and my husband at 120 miles per hour, and actually think about them and absorb it,” said Ms. Plame. “I found that whole part of the process a catharsis in many ways.”

To date, however, the process of publishing the book has been fraught with difficulties.

To wit: This past Thursday, Ms. Plame filed a lawsuit in federal court against the C.I.A, which is blocking the publication of her memoir, on the grounds that some of the information contained therein is classified.

Like all C.I.A. employees, Ms. Plame had previously signed an agreement requiring her to submit any future writing about her career to the agency for review before publication. According to Ms. Plame, she and Simon & Schuster had been working unsuccessfully for months with the C.I.A. in the hopes of reaching an agreement. When that failed, according to Ms. Plame, she had decided to sue the C.I.A. for violating her right to free speech.

“I am not seeking carte blanche to reveal all the details of my government service,” Ms. Plame told the audience at the BEA. “Not at all. I understand my obligation and responsibilities about preserving and protecting classified information. Absolutely. But I am entitled to write about my story.”

She alleged to the audience that the C.I.A.’s actions were politically motivated. “I can tell you, this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political interference,” she said.

“This is why this suit matters so much to me and everyone in this room,” added Ms. Plame. “Because just as you have to be vigilant to protect our national security--something I believe in passionately--we have to be vigilant to protect our freedom of speech and first amendment rights.”

There was more applause. Followed by cheesecake for dessert.

Before returning to her seat, Ms. Plame acknowledged that the bulk of her writings throughout her career had been “very very dry.” Composing Fair Game, she said, had been different.

“I enjoyed writing it,” said Ms. Plame. “I hope you enjoy reading it.”