


Scholastic became the second New York publishing house in a week to suffer a bedbug scare this past Friday afternoon, as employees were told to put whatever belongings they needed over the weekend into plastic bags and asked to go home. As was widely reported at the time, a similar scene had taken place at Read More

The Penguin building has a bedbug infestation, as Gawker reported earlier this afternoon. Management sent a memo out to staff yesterday warning them of “an insect issue in certain areas” on several floors. Staff were instructed to vacate the building by 1 p.m. today and not return until Monday while pest control goes in and Read More

Before his little problem came up recently, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford had a book scheduled for publication from Penguin’s conservative Sentinel imprint in March of next year. He still might! As first reported this morning by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, Sentinel publisher Adrian Zackheim is trying to figure out what to do Read More

Amazon and Penguin Group USA announced this morning that from now until February 8th they’re accepting submissions for their second annual Breakthrough Novel contest. Like last year’s champion, a Brooklyn-born fellow named Bill Loehfelm who wrote a thriller called Fresh Kills, the winner of this year’s contest will receive a $25,000 book deal Read More

Viking beat out seven other houses the other day in the battle for Angelology, the debut novel by Falling Through the Earth author Danielle Trussoni that’s supposed to have massive commercial appeal and sell a gazillion copies just like The Da Vinci Code. According to Publishers Weekly, which reported yesterday that the deal was Read More

Remember when Lehman Brothers collapsed and every financial journalist in the world had a book deal about the economic crisis like five minutes later? Well, apparently a few of them were outside smoking or something while that was going on, because there are at least eight people out there right now working on books about Read More

This morning Penguin Group USA unveiled a new initiative they’re called "Penguin 2.0" that so far consists of this Web site, an iPhone app, and a new print-on-demand edition of Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol that customers can fit with their own personalized dedication for $17. The dedications can be up to 350 words Read More

The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blogger Thessaly La Force emailed a few people who work at publishing houses around town and asked them to submit reactions to all the bad news that came out during this tense and tumultuous week. So far they have responses posted from people at FSG, Penguin, and Hachette. Read More

Earlier today Media Mob reported that political polling expert Nate Silver, the wunderkind statistician behind the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com, was out with a proposal for two books: one about the art of prediction and the other a Freakonomics-style guide to the mechanics of electoral politics. Mr. Silver’s agent, Sydelle Kramer of the Susan Read More