According to Scholastic corporate spokeswoman Kyle Good, a sniffing dog was brought in on Thursday to the children’s publishing headquarters on Broadway after an employee reported having a bedbug infestation at home. The dog barked, Ms. Good said, which meant there was a possibility that bed bugs were in the building.

“After that we sent someone in to look, and no one could find any evidence of it, but we decided to treat that floor anyway,” Ms. Good said. “The whole floor was sprayed last night, and we’ll repeat that in 14 days, which is best practice.”

Ms. Good emphasized that there had been no physical evidence of bedbugs, and that the treatment had been carried out as a precaution “for the sake of the employees.”

“There may not have been an infestation at all,” Ms. Good said. “There was no evidence that there was one, other than the dog’s reaction.”
 
Will New York publishing get a bad rap as a result of this Penguin-Scholastic one-two punch?

Ms. Good cautioned against drawing any connection between the two incidents, and cited a recent New York Times article about the city’s ongoing bedbug problem.

“I mean, it’s an office,” Ms. Good said. “It has nothing to do with what we do here.”

The situation at Penguin, by the way, seems to have lost its urgency. According to a source in the building, no update has been circulated since exterminators swept the place, and the consensus among staff is that the threat was overblown.

Marilyn Ducksworth, the corporate spokeswoman for Penguin, said today that the sweep carried out two weekends ago was "a preventative measure." 

"There was never an infestation," she said. "Not one bug was found in either building."

The obvious question to ask here is: what will become of all the books in the building? There are probably thousands of them! Are they all just going to have to get thrown away? Or microwaved!?

For answers, The Observer turned to a couple of bedbug experts: entomologist Louis Sorkin from the American Museum of Natural History and Jennifer Erdogan, the director of bedbug control services at New Jersey-based Bell Environmental Services.

Both assured us that unless the infestation at Penguin is at a very advanced stage, it is pretty unlikely that the bugs will get inside the books, because most are probably sitting in stacks or on shelves. “They don’t necessarily like books, especially,” said Mr. Sorkin. But! That doesn’t mean books will escape contamination all together. According to Ms. Erdogan, the bugs could find harborage in the bindings or simply on the books’ covers.

If that happens, she said, the easiest course of action would be fumigation, which would be fine except that, in New York, it’s illegal to fumigate a whole building.

“The books could be removed from the site and brought to New Jersey and fumigated in a chamber—that’s called chamber fumigation,” Ms. Erdogan said. “You could also do fumigation within bags, and that is legal to do in the city. That would require placing books inside a heavy plastic bag … and then you can place a little fumigant strip inside and seal up the bag and fumigate within the bag.”

What about using a microwave or an oven, as some people suggest?

“The books might catch on fire,” Ms. Erdogan said. “In order to kill bedbugs, it has to be about 120 or 140 degrees or higher. You could try putting them in the dryer, if you wanted to wrap them inside a towel, but that’s just not practical for a publisher. I mean, if it’s somebody who just had a few books you could that but not on that scale.”

What exactly are the pest control people going to do when they take over 375 Hudson this weekend? We read our experts the staff memo, which asked everyone to leave their “office doors, files, and desks unlocked,” “leave in place any items that have not been recently used, rather than take them home,” and “make accessible the perimeter of your office/cubicle as much as possible.”

“They could use dogs to sniff out the bedbugs,” Mr. Sorkin said. “The good dogs and handlers are good at picking up live infestations and then those can be isolated. … It could be that if you do a good detection, you could find that it’s not extensive throughout the whole building at all. So maybe that’s what they’re going to work on from now until Monday, and then they’ll spot-treat areas.”

“It sounds like it’ll be a detailed crack-and-crevice treatment,” said Ms. Erdogan. “Whoever’s doing the work would, I hope, come in and literally treat every crack and crevice—base moldings, cubicle dividers, all the desks and drawers. In addition, we normally advise people to take home their personal items—you know, gym bags, all those kinds of things. The less clutter, the better your success rate will be. Because the bugs like to hide on everything.”

Should journalists and book critics be worried about opening Penguin packages in the next couple of days? Not really, but maybe, according to Ms. Erdogan.

“Bedbugs aren’t invisible, so you could see a bedbug on a book,” she said. “And again, with a closed book that’s been on a shelf pressed against other books, it’s unlikely that the bugs could get inside. Is it possible? Yeah, there’s always a slim chance. I would advise whoever’s receiving them to be careful and inspect the packages.”

Calls to Penguin corporate spokeswoman Marilyn Ducksworth went unreturned this morning. We will update you on this situation as it develops.

We checked in with Sentinel associate publisher Will Weisser this afternoon, and he said a decision was likely to be reached next week, after Mr. Zackheim returns from a vacation in England. 

"Adrian has checked in but we haven't made any decisions," Mr. Weisser said. "Obviously, there's a lot to think about. We need to talk to the governor and his people. It's just such an unusual situation. You don't want to rush into any decision."

Unfortunately, Sentinel has already shipped the proofs for its spring catalog to the printers, and Mr. Sanford's book—which was to be one of the conservative imprint's lead titles for the season—is in there front and center. One supposes it will be serve as a charming collector's item, if nothing else.

To reach that mantle, you must get past several juries, starting with the chorus of Amazon's Expert Reviewers and ending, American Idol-style, with the folks watching at home. In between, the submissions will be judged by Publishers Weekly reviewers, editors from Penguin, and a panel of "publishing industry professionals" which this year includes Penguin authors Sue Grafton and Sue Monk Kidd, as well as literary agent Barney Karpfinger and Penguin Press editor-in-chief Eamon Dolan. The whole thing will end on May 22.

For an "insider's look" at how Amazon's 2008 contest worked and felt, read "Reality Publishing" by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington in the first issue of n+1's new online book review. Mr. Wellington, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, was responsible for reviewing submissions during an early stage of last year's contest, and was left with a rather sour taste in his mouth. As he puts it near the end of his piece:

Did we say already that the deadline for submissions is February 8th? Because, it is. Now get typing.

Congrats to Viking for pulling out a win. Except! The real fun’s just getting started, because it’s not just one editor who wants the book but two, and the author has to think about it now and decide who she wants to work with.

In the ring: Molly Stern, who is Viking’s editorial director for fiction, and Pam Dorman, who racked up hits at Viking for 19 years before leaving for a brief stint at Hyperion, and then returning to start her own eponymous imprint. Ms. Dorman has made best sellers out of books like The Secret Life of Bees, Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and Must Love Dogs.

Eric Simonoff, the literary agent who represented Ms. Trussoni on the deal, said yesterday that his client is in the process of making her choice.

It’s kind of a loaded thing. Because Ms. Dorman and Ms. Stern tend to overlap so much in sensibility—and because both are thought major editors with very strong track records—Ms. Stern was the first person many publishing observers thought of when it was announced last summer that Ms. Dorman had decided to give up on the Hyperion experiment and come back to Viking.

One wondered at the time whether the two women would collide in pursuit of marquee books. As far as anyone we talked to yesterday knew, Ms. Trussoni’s book is the first major title to inspire such a showdown.  

According to Mr. Simonoff, Penguin made an offer on behalf of the whole house early Tuesday. At that point, the bid represented interest from three Penguin editors—Ms. Stern, Ms. Dorman and Amy Einhorn, who runs her own imprint at Putnam. That bid didn’t do it for Mr. Simonoff, though, and some hours later Penguin came back with a better one, this time without Ms. Einhorn in the mix.

Is it kind of uncomfortable that two editors from the same imprint are competing for the same book? Aren’t there rules to prevent this situation from arising?

Publicists at Viking did not comment, saying they were not familiar enough with the details to say anything, and neither Ms. Stern and Ms. Dorman returned calls seeking comment. Mr. Simonoff, for his part, said yesterday that everyone is just “learning as [they] go.”

“In days past there’d be a scramble within 375 Hudson and only one house would be designated as the bidder,” he said. “That’s clearly changing.”

Did he have any sense of who Ms. Trussoni was leaning towards?

“I saw her for lunch—she had flown in because she was planning on coming to the city anyway—and as of lunchtime she had absolutely no idea how she was going to make that decision or who she was going to be edited by,” Mr. Simonoff said.

The latest comes from business reporter Erin Arvedlund, whom Adrian Zackheim from Penguin’s Portfolio imprint signed up earlier this week for a book called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The special thing about Ms. Arvedlund-- the thing that compelled Portfolio assistant editor Brooke Carey to seek her out when she heard her being interviewed on NPR recently-- is that she was investigating and publicly questioning Madoff’s investment methods as far back as May 2001. This is a fact Portfolio’s publicity team will surely remind readers of many times when the book is published during the spring of 2010.

Will Weisser, the associate publisher of Portfolio, conceded in an interview yesterday that Ms. Arvedlund has quite a bit of competition on the Madoff book beat, but that he is confident she will write the definitive account.

“There's a pack,” Mr. Weisser said. “It's definitely going to be competitive. The question ultimately is going to be who writes the best book.”

Two authors who will definitely be gunning against Ms. Arvedlund are former NY1 reporter Andrew Kirtzman, who is writing a Madoff book for Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins, and magazine journalist Richard Behar, who is writing one for Random House.
 
Literary agent Richard Abate, who represented Mr. Behar, predicted back in December that by the time everyone in publishing returned to their desks after the holidays, there would be “three or four” other Madoff proposals floating around. "I think publishers will think long and hard before signing up a third book," Mr. Abate said then, very clearly pleased with the fact that he and his client had come rushing through the gate as early as he did.

Some of Mr. Abate’s rival agents are hoping he is wrong.

As of late last week, there were fully four Madoff-related books on the market that had not yet found homes. One of them we know absolutely nothing about (the editors who received the submission were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement) but one is being written by the Financial Times columnist John Gapper and repped by agent David Kuhn, and a third comes from Richistan-author Robert Frank and is being handled by Inkwell Management’s Richard Pine. A fourth is out from former Little, Browner Fredi Friedman, who would not discuss the book or confirm its existence last week, but indicated that she would call Pub Crawl when someone bought it.

So, look forward to that.

Mr. Gomez, whose main duty is overseeing the Penguin Web site, said that in 2009 the company will introduce a program that allows customers to choose from a variety of short stories, essays, and other short standalone texts and combine them into custom-made collections. Mr. Gomez said the program is part of Penguin's effort to incorporate elements of so called 'Web 2.0' into publishing without abandoning print.

Taking sites like AnthologyBuilder.com and iTunes as inspiration, Mr. Gomez said, Penguin hopes the "Custom" program will tap into people's desire "to remix a little and to shuffle their playlists." He cautioned, however, that he "would never want to break apart an entire book" and thereby render the full-length volume obsolete the way iTunes has done to the 74-minute LP.

Related: Pub Crawl on why major publishers are reluctant to break up short story anthologies and and sell them a la carte.

While the Hachette submission doesn't offer anything noteworthy, the person from FSG reports that editors at the boutique literary house are "feeling the burn with shorter print runs and a tightening on what we can buy" and that there have been "some really bleak editorial meetings."

Also, alert to agents! Apparently the "powers that be"—presumably at Macmillan—"have been encouraging us to come up with book ideas and seek out authors ourselves, rather than relying on agents."

The New Yorker's Penguin source, meanwhile, asserts that the recently imposed freeze on raises for people earning more than $50,000 will save parent company Pearson "upward of forty million dollars."

Nothing has appeared yet from anyone at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, but that's probably just because everything at those houses is fine.

According to several sources, that auction has ended, and Penguin Group USA has prevailed.

Which of Penguin's imprint will publish Mr. Silver has not yet been determined, however, as there are at least three within the company that are jockeying for the privilege. The pricetag, we hear, is above $600,000 but below $1 million—a healthy sum even though it's paying for two books rather than just one. Update, 5:00 p.m.: New intelligence says Mr. Silver's advance is in the neighborhood of $700,000, give or take a few grand.

Now Mr. Silver just has to choose which imprint he likes best, a process that is unlikely to be resolved before next week.

Penguin Group's corporate publicists Marilyn Ducksworth and Dave Zimmer did not immediately respond to requests for more details.