“Mort and I are far from retiring,” Lynn Nesbit said on Friday afternoon. “It isn’t a question on the table at the moment. It really isn’t.”

The night before, one of the stars at the boutique literary agency Ms. Nesbit runs with Mort Janklow abruptly announced that he was leaving for a job at the global, multiplatform talent agency William Morris. Eric Simonoff, who represents Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri and others, had spent 18 years at Janklow & Nesbit. Apart from a stint as an assistant at Norton the year after he graduated from college, it was the only job he’d ever had. At 41, he was widely thought to be the prince of the firm, in line to one day take over for Ms. Nesbit and Mr. Janklow alongside his equally heavy-hitting colleague, Tina Bennett.

Precisely what such a takeover would potentially entail depends on who you ask, but until last week, the consensus assumption among publishing people was that the agency’s namesakes, 78-year-old Mort and 70-year-old Lynn, had been deliberately grooming Mr. Simonoff and Ms. Bennett, and would hand the reins to the agency over to them when they got tired of steering it. 

Because of this, many found Mr. Simonoff’s sudden defection puzzling, and the motivations behind it have been intensely debated.

Though Mr. Simonoff could not be reached for comment, Ms. Nesbit said Friday it wasn’t really so complicated at all.

"I think what provoked him is the huge financial offer,” she said. “I think it’s as simple as money. He said they made him an offer he felt he could not refuse.” 

She added, “He’ll be the only alpha male in William Morris's literary department.”

Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, co-heads of the William Morris literary department, announced their new hire on Friday just as all of publishing prepared to pack into the New School’s Tishman Auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The news appeared on The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog under the headline, “A Star Book Agent’s New Home.” Therein, Ms. Gluck was quoted as saying Mr. Simonoff had been her “dream date” for years.

Three well-placed sources who would not speak for attribution said Ms. Gluck and Ms. Walsh (neither of whom would comment for this article) had been actively looking to add someone of Mr. Simonoff's stature to their ranks for several years. Several industry people—knowledgeable ones, the lot of them, though obviously all too shy to speak on the record—said William Morris could use someone with literary sensibilities who can hit home runs with titles that skew more commercial than the high quality (but often narrowly targeted) stuff that Bill Clegg tends to do.

Publishing people were giddy when they heard about Mr. Simonoff's job change last week, and not even because they were happy for him—though some were—but because it was surprising, and exciting, and an undeniable show of force by William Morris that no one really knew how to explain off the top of their heads. Editors, publishers, agents, everyone wanted to talk about it, and they got into work on Friday still drunk on the news and excited to start calling and emailing one another about it. People asked if a “dominant theory” had emerged, the question invariably coming out sounding hopeful, but also cautious, because no one really wanted the fun to end.

The last time anyone felt this way was in June, when News Corp. fired Jane Friedman. With all that had happened since—the wrenching reorganization of Random House, the closing of Collins—that felt like a lifetime ago. 

"Was I shocked? No,” Ms. Nesbit said on Friday. “I was surprised but not shocked. I think Eric has to spread his wings. Maybe it was all too much like family."

But what exactly was behind Mr. Simonoff’s defection? His colleagues in the industry were left scratching their heads over the weekend.

“There had to have been something material that prompted it,” one editor said. “It’s not something you would do just for the sake of it ‘I just want a change’— agents don’t do it.”

Was it as Ms. Nesbit said? Had William Morris just offered Mr. Simonoff a dizzying amount of money? Or was there more at work—like, say, unresolved succession issues at Janklow & Nesbit that might have caused the famously ambitious agent to lose his patience with the firm and seek out something more secure? 

In a sense, there are two stories here, one about why Mr. Simonoff is joining William Morris, and the other about why he is leaving Janklow.

One theory is that he was tempted by all the perks that come with working for a large multimedia talent agency—namely, access to in-house film and TV agents who can help him not only by selling his adaptation-ready literary properties but also by giving him business whenever one of their celebrity clients wants to write a book.

In an interview Friday, former William Morris literary head Owen Laster, who retired from the firm after 46 years in 2006, said many of the opportunities a large organization with many branches offers are simply not possible at a small, prestige shop like Janklow & Nesbit. He offered that when he was agenting at WMA, he “personally handled many film and television deals” for his clients, and “very often” collaborated with people in other parts of the company.

“That office [Janklow & Nesbitt], although primarily literary, has a pretty wide base, but not like William Morris,” Mr. Laster said. “Their connection with CAA and other offices gives them power in those areas, but at William Morris it’s more direct—it’s our clients.” 

While the possibility of multimedia domination may have certainly appealed to Mr. Simonoff, the real reason behind his decision to leave his longtime home probably had a lot more to do with the murky question of succession at Janklow & Nesbit and the sense of uncertainty that is clouding the agency’s future. 

For one thing, Mr. Janklow is said to have thought seriously about selling the company over the years—and though he has denied it, he has reportedly put a price tag on it that was rebuffed by potential buyers. For another, there is the matter of Mr. Janklow’s 41-year-old son Luke, a former rock singer and current restaurant owner who has in recent years been doing some agenting for his father's shop, and Ms. Nesbit’s daughter Priscilla Gilman—a recovering English professor who recently returned from a nine-month leave of absence during which she wrote a memoir about motherhood.   

Did the presence of the young Mr. Janklow and Ms. Gilman signal to Mr. Simonoff that the agency would always remain a family business? That all the loyalty in the world wasn’t going to make it any more likely that he'd ever be made partner?

Nonsense, according to Ms. Nesbit: “I don’t think it was about succession," she said. "I honestly, genuinely do not think it was about that."

"I think Luke has many strings to his bow,” she added, referring to the young Mr. Janklow’s various non-literary pursuits, which also includes collecting guitars and cars. “I have a very strong alpha male here, you see, in Mort Janklow. Eric felt more comfortable with another younger guy here. I don’t think Luke and Priscilla were in any way a threat to him.”

Regardless of why it happened, Mr. Simonoff’s departure unmistakably leaves Janklow & Nesbit with a future even more uncertain than the one it was already looking forward to, especially considering that whatever finally convinced Mr. Simonoff to flee could conceivably convince Ms. Bennett to do the same.

Several people noted that Ms. Bennett and Mr. Simonoff are the only major players at the agency bringing in new clients and making spectacular sales with any regularity (Update, 5:15PM: It should be noted that just two weeks ago, Ms. Nesbit placed the journalist Andrew Meier's The House of Morgenthau with Random House, and before that sold a memoir by young Iraq veteran Christopher Brownfield to Knopf). Mr. Simonoff has Ms. Lahiri and Edward P. Jones, for example, and in January, he showed his muscle when he sold Danielle Trussoni’s debut novel Angelology in a hotly contested auction for nearly $1 million. Ms. Bennett, in turn, represents Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Laura Hillenbrand, Eric Schlosser and many others. Sure, the elder Mr. Janklow can still do a multimillion-dollar eight-book deal for Danielle Steele with his eyes closed when he wants to, and Ms. Nesbit is still putting up dizzying numbers with her Tom Wolfe and her Anne Rice sales. But as one publisher put it, “they’re not taking on new people. What’s the future?” 

That publisher, along with other executives, speculated on Friday about whether Mr. Simonoff’s departure might inspire Ms. Bennett to look for other work, or whether it would instead have the effect of forcing some of the succession issues at the agency to the fore.  

Though unlikely, Ms. Bennett could conceivably follow Mr. Simonoff to William Morris. Said one knowledgeable agent, “Jennifer Walsh used to say, 'I'll get Tina Bennett over here—Watch me.’”

Ms. Nesbit sounded cool as a cucumber when confronted with that scenario Friday. "I expect Tina to be here forever,” she said.

Ms. Bennett declined to comment for this article.

Lots of highlights in there, but perhaps most striking is the overpowering sense that Things Used to Be Better:

More along these lines after the jump.

And finally: "I miss the fun. I tell [colleagues] Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff]... People are too scared. [Publishing] doesn't attract eccentrics anymore."

The literary agent was reflecting on her client Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It was, she said, a difficult subject to address.

Ms. Nesbit, 67, has had more than an agent-writer connection to Ms. Didion and her award-winning meditation on death and its effects—she is entwined with the book’s narrative. Ms. Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne, was also a client and friend of Ms. Nesbit. Ms. Nesbit spoke to Dunne twice on the day he died, and the memoir describes how she was the first person to visit Ms. Didion when the author returned from the hospital that night.

“I knew Joan had no family in New York, so I went over,” Ms. Nesbit said.

In her four decades as a literary agent, Ms. Nesbit has cultivated close relationships with writers of widely varying styles and sensibilities. “You have to attend to whoever is in need at the moment,” she said.

Ms. Nesbit’s writers include critical luminaries like Ms. Didion and Tom Wolfe, and commercial juggernauts like Michael Crichton. Currently, she has the No. 1 book on the New York Times best-seller list, Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values. Ms. Nesbit resides in a $3.5 million Park Avenue apartment and has a country house in Connecticut’s Litchfield County.

She came to New York in the fall of 1960, fresh out of Northwestern and the Radcliffe publishing course. After a brief stint reading French manuscripts as an editorial apprentice at Ladies’ Home Journal, she convinced the agent Sterling Lord, whom she’d met at the Radcliffe course, to hire her as an assistant.

“I had an instinctual feeling that this was something I wanted to do,” she said. “I felt it was probably faster-paced, and as an agent you could work in a more independent way than you could in a big publishing company.”

In addition to handling office busywork, Ms. Nesbit assisted Mr. Lord with his magazine writers. Her first clients were Donald Barthelme and Victor Navasky. In 1963, she called Byron Dobell at Esquire and asked him to arrange a meeting with Tom Wolfe, who had just published “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” in the magazine. She persuaded Mr. Wolfe to sign up with her, even though she was some seven years his junior and had virtually no agenting experience.

“I still don’t know why he ever signed with me,” she said, “I still have to ask him, because I was this kid.”

Mr. Wolfe said Ms. Nesbit saw a chance to do a book where he didn’t see one, suggesting a collection of his magazine work.

“She told me, ‘I have your first book,’” Mr. Wolfe recalled of his first meeting with Ms. Nesbit.

“I thought, ‘Gee who’s going to read a book of magazine pieces by someone who they’ve never heard of?’” Mr. Wolfe said. “In fact, it became a best-seller.”

In 1964, at the suggestion of a friend, she helped establish the literary-agency division of Marvin Josephson Associates, which would become the modern-day ICM. (In late 1988, she left ICM to form a partnership with Mort Janklow, retaining her loyal client base.)

Ms. Nesbit’s next big break came in 1965, when she signed Michael Crichton while he was still in medical school.

“He said, ‘Let’s grow up in the business together,’” Ms. Nesbit said.

Publishing executives who have negotiated deals with her say that she possesses a talent for understanding both the literary and commercial aspects of the business.

“She’s a great reader,” said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of HarperCollins. “She’s got a sensitivity and a nose for what has commercial potential.”

“She’s a very tough negotiator for her authors. But there’s a lot of realism there,” said Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “She’s very aggressive in a very genteel way.”

Or as Mr. Wolfe put it: “She has a lot more nerve than I do. She establishes the target and goes right for it. She asks for sums I’d never dream of.”

Those sums have reached stratospheric heights. In 2001, she brokered a reported $30 million deal for Mr. Crichton when he moved to HarperCollins after a 30-year run at Knopf.

“I hope I’ve shown you can be tough but honorable,” Ms. Nesbit said. “And I hope I’ve shown you can build a career by developing writers and not stealing them.”

"They just found they weren't spending much time here," Mr. Davis told The Observer . "They spend most of their time in London and Palm Beach." The Rayneses did not return a call for comment.

The8,000-square-foot,Norman Jaffe-designed house was a monument to the 80's: a three-story, 17-room modern affair in several different shades of brown wood and stone, with 495 feet of oceanfront, a heated swimming pool, an outdoor Jacuzzi and an all-weather tennis court–not to mention the pool house where 80's tennis great Vitas Gerulaitis died from carbon-monoxide poisoning seven years ago.

The Southampton home was erected in 1985, the same year Mr. Raynes negotiated his biggest deal: He and Bernard Mendik, another big real estate player of the 80's (who was also building a house in Southampton at the time) paid roughly $500 million for 45 apartment houses, containing 6,200 rental units, being sold by the MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. The New York Times called it the largest residential real estate transaction that the New York metropolitan area had ever seen.

Indeed, the house was a trophy for Mr. Raynes, a onetime party boy who grew up in Scarsdale, attended the University of Pennsylvania and married Patricia Davis, the daughter of Marvin Davis, the oil entrepreneur who owned 20th Century Fox. On the ground floor there is a large living room with cathedral ceilings, a hand-cut stone wall with a fireplace, hardwood sheathing on the walls, geometric marble floor tiles and views of both the ocean and Coopers Neck Pond. There is also an "informal" living room with an indoor lap pool and a sauna. The second floor contains two bedroom suites, and the third floor is devoted to a master-bedroom suite with another stone fireplace, a media room and a bathroom (marble, of course) overlooking the pond.

Mr. Raynes got his start working for his father, Julius Raynes of Raynes Realty, a company that had extensive commercial and residential holdings. In the 1970's he started his own company, M.J.R. Development Corp., which specialized in Manhattan residential conversions. But when the real estate boom of the 80's ended, Mr. Raynes was hurt badly. In 1992, he filed for personal bankruptcy after two of his condominium projects stalled. Then, in 1994, after Mr. Gerulaitis' death, the tennis player's family brought a civil suit against Mr. Raynes for $63 million. The case was dropped in 1998. Meanwhile, in 1997, the couple had sold their 11th-floor apartment at 4 East 66th Street for $14 million and were living ina$60,000-a-month rental at Trump International Hotel and Towers at 1 Central Park West.

Although the couple will not be looking for a place in the Hamptons, New York City brokers say that they started apartment-hunting in Manhattan in mid-March. According to sources, they are looking for a place in the $6 million range.

Even for twice that much, it was apparently not architecture or interior design that sold the Rayneses' Southampton house. The new buyers "are going to make considerable changes," said Mr. Davis, though they won't demolish it. "They were looking for a good plot of land more than anything else."

Mr. Davis said the new owners have rented the house out as is for a good portion of the summer and will begin renovations in the early fall.

UPPER EAST SIDE

ÜBER-AGENT LYNN NESBIT'S JURASSIC PARK AVENUE PAD Thank you, Michael Crichton! Last month, as Lynn Nesbit was sealing a $30 million-plus deal with HarperCollins for the Jurassic Park author's next two books, the veteran literary agent also got the green light from the co-op board of 480 Park Avenue to buy an apartment there.

Ms. Nesbit paid $3.5 million for the eight-room, 3,200-square-foot duplex co-op, near 58th Street, in a deal that was final on March 12. Broker A. Laurance Kaiser IV of Key-Ventures Inc., who represented the seller, the estate of Judy Cowan, a photographer and philanthropist, said the apartment had been on the market for a year at a selling price of $3.8 million. Ms. Nesbit signed a contract to buy it last November.

"She liked it right away. She adored it," said Mr. Kaiser, who blamed the closing's delay on "a slow-acting board." The apartment has planted terraces off every room, two bedrooms, four bathrooms, a library, a double-height, 37-foot-long living room, a wood-burning fireplace and views to the south and east. "It's a jewel," Mr. Kaiser said.

The 21-story building is home to singer Neil Sedaka, former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Maxwell Raab and Rodin collector Iris Cantor.

Ms. Nesbit, who has also bagged book deals for Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Carter, Gay Talese, Joan Didion and Anne Rice in her 33-year career and is co-owner of Janklow & Nesbit, has listed her old apartment, on the 10th floor of 44 West 77th Street, on the market for $5.85 million with Leighton Candler, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens. Ms. Nesbit didn't return calls for comment.

UPPER WEST SIDE

RIVERDANCE DIRECTOR'S STOMPING GROUNDS GO TO TYCO EXEC FOR $4.75 MILLION As if Riverdance weren't enough of a cash cow, the man behind the Irish version of Stomp made an even bigger pile of cash after selling this 2,094-square-foot apartment on the 40th floor of 1 Central Park West. John McColgan, the now quasi-retired director of Riverdance , sold the apartment in the Trump International Hotel and Towers to Richard Kashnow, the president of Tyco Ventures, the venture-capital branch of Tyco International Ltd., for $4.75 million.

Riverdance was conceived when Mr. McColgan's partner, Moya Doherty, decided that a bunch of quick-stepping, semi-traditional Irish dancers would make a great seven-minute interval performance at the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1994. The audience's response was so incredible that the partners decided to turn the short dance number into a full-length show. She would produce; he would direct. (He had been the director of Tyrone Productions, a leading independent television and film production company in Ireland, and chairman of Ireland's national radio station.) They found a few investors, then came up with the rest of the dough by taking out a second mortgage on their home.

The first full-length performance was staged in Dublin in 1995. The show went to England that same year, where the 10 original scheduled performances were bumped up to 150. Factor in the Riverdance CD's, merchandise and videotapes, and the show rivals U2 as Ireland's biggest commercial export.

According to Mr. McColgan's broker, Roger Erickson of William B. May, the director bought the apartment for $4.2 million back in 1999, not long before Riverdance opened on Broadway in March of 2000. When Riverdance closed in January, Mr. McColgan had already put the apartment back on the market last October.

Mr. Kashnow came to Tyco in 1999 after the company bought Raychem Corporation, a public technology firm where he was chairman and chief executive. His new apartment has two bedrooms, a library, and an eat-in kitchen with a washer and dryer. The living room and dining room both have views of Central Park, and there is a central stereo system as well as electronic solar shades.

Dancing is optional.

401 West End Avenue

One-bed, one-bath, 850-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $500,000. Selling: $469,000.

Charges: $927; 50 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: three weeks.

YOU'D CALL THIS A REGRESSION! Earlier this year, the buyer of this 850-square-foot, three-and-a-half-room apartment had an epiphany. He would sell the significantly larger apartment he had been living in for several years at the height of the market, wait a while for things to cool off, and then find a small place to buy in the same neighborhood with prewar details similar to the old apartment. Who needs all that space anyway as long as you still have your moldings? (Tell that to the rest of the city!) "He wanted to travel more and somewhat retire on the profits from his old apartment," said his broker, Diane Dickinson of the Fox Residential Group. Buyer and broker looked for four months before finding this place, which has a large turret window, river views from the bedroom and original moldings (of course!). The eat-in kitchen was recently updated, but the buyer plans to redo it anyway, maybe to make it feel more like home.

SUTTON PLACE

410 East 57th Street

Three-bed, three-bath, 2,200-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $1.295 million. Selling: $1.3 million.

Charges: $2,185; 41 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: two years.

THE MARKET IN SLOW MOTION Back in November of 1998, a family of five was moving to a house, so they prepared to unload this three-bedroom apartment with a maid's room. In no rush to sell–the new place was getting a gutting–they played around a little in the market, overpricing this apartment just to see what happened. As it turns out, nothing happened. In April of 1999, they reduced the price to $1.4 million; in August of 1999, it dropped to $1.226 million. At that number, the apartment became hot. Three people were bidding, an offer was accepted, but the buyer didn't pass the board. Still, the sellers were feeling a little giddy and put the apartment back on the market for $1.375 million. (Read: The new place still wasn't ready.) The price was dropped to $1.295 million before it would sell, this time to a young couple who were renting just a couple of blocks away. They passed the board and bought the apartment the second week in March. The apartment has an eat-in kitchen, a formal dining room, a wood-burning fireplace and marble baths. As for the sellers, their new home is still not ready, but they've moved somewhere else temporarily. Jackie Vincent of the Corcoran Group, who represented the sellers, said she showed this apartment more than 230 times in two years.

SOHO

121 Prince Street

One-bed, one-bath, 2,400-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $1.595 million. Selling: $1.525 million.

Charges: $1,100; 56 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: three months.

UNADULTERATED SPACE This apartment is located in the Tri-Prince building, one of Soho's oldest loft co-ops, which sprawls over three buildings between Wooster and Greene streets. The owner of this apartment decided to move out of the city. "It is very rare to find a loft that hasn't been adulterated," said one broker of the apartment. "This one still had its integrity." To some, that's just a nice way of saying the place needs lots of work. The buyers are the second uptowners to buy in this building in the past month. They will redo everything.