“I was completely upfront with them,” the agent said recently. “I said, ‘Hey, look, I’m gonna be suing you guys in a few days—is this gonna have any effect on my client?’ They said the two things had nothing to do with each other.”

The meeting took place on Feb. 12. About two weeks later, on Feb. 24, Mr. Weisfeld filed his lawsuit. In it, the outraged agent alleged that Jaime Lowe’s Digging for Dirt, an unauthorized biography of the late rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard, published last fall by an imprint of Macmillan-owned Farrar, Straus and Giroux, contained “malicious, false, defamatory and anti-Semitic statements” about him. Mr. Weisfeld, who served as Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s manager from the time the rapper got out of jail in 2003 until he died of an accidental drug overdose in 2004, felt he had been unfairly portrayed in the book as an opportunistic kid taking advantage of a troubled man. 

Mr. Weisfeld is now 29. He grew up in Rockland County, where he was raised by a homemaker mom and a dad who made his living as one of the founders of Mudd Jeans. His first big job in entertainment was at VH1, where he worked as a production assistant on a couple of episodes of Driven before successfully pitching a reality show about Ol’ Dirty Bastard. This was after a stint as a day trader and some time working on the last N*SYNC tour, during which he met his wife.

Mr. Weisfeld opened his talent agency, Objective Entertainment, two years ago, and since then has sold memoirs by such pop culture figures as Saved by the Bell’s Dustin “Screech” Diamond and Robert Englund, the actor who played Freddy Krueger. Before he hooked up with Mr. Blagojevich, the only political book he’d ever worked on was People reporter Lorenzo Benet’s biography of Sarah Palin.

Objective is housed in a building in Chinatown on a block heavily populated by gift shops and jewelry stores. Mr. Weisfeld recently hosted Pub Crawl in the break room there, in order to discuss his lawsuit against Macmillan and the odd experience he had when he brought Rod Blagojevich into their offices in the Flatiron Building for a meeting.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m in this building! After what these guys did to me—this is crazy!’” Mr. Weisfeld said of his visit. “I was like, ‘This is the most selfless thing an agent can do, come to a building where they say all this nasty anti-Semitic stuff about you in a book.’”

Mr. Weisfeld said he took the meeting at Macmillan because he’d been given reason to believe that St. Martin’s would pay “big money” for the book.

And he said he came away from the meeting thinking that the deal was all but done. The next morning, according to Mr. Weisfeld, St. Martin’s editor Elizabeth Beier called and gave him the impression that the imprint was mulling an offer between $200,000 and $350,000. Mr. Weisfeld was ready to take it.

An hour later, though, according to Mr. Weisfeld’s account, he got another call from Ms. Beier. This time, he says, she told him St. Martin’s would not be making a cash offer after all, and asked him if he’d consider something like a profit share.

Mr. Weisfeld was angry, and didn’t understand what had happened. In an attempt to sort it out, he says, he called St. Martin’s publisher, Sally Richardson, and chief operating officer Steve Cohen—both of whom expressed enthusiasm for the Blagojevich book after the meeting—but failed to get a satisfying explanation from either. Ms. Richardson especially annoyed him. “She said, ‘I’ll take you out to lunch and you’ll forget about the whole thing,’” Mr. Weisfeld said, incensed. “She was talking to me like I was her kid! It was frustrating to me.”

The following Tuesday, Feb. 17, St. Martin’s reiterated their position, prompting Mr. Weisfeld to call up Macmillan CEO John Sargent and to register his displeasure for about an hour.

Ms. Richardson and Mr. Cohen both declined to answer questions, and like Ms. Beier and Mr. Sargent, Macmillan’s in-house attorney Paul Slevin did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

A senior-level employee at St. Martin’s who refused to speak for attribution said Mr. Weisfeld’s lawsuit against Macmillan had nothing to do with the decision not to pursue the Blagojevich book.

“A major publisher like St. Martin’s gets thousands of submissions and meets with hundreds of authors during the year, and due to the economic realities of the publishing business, turns down the majority of them,” the employee said.

On March 2, it was announced that the West Coast–based independent Phoenix Books, which has previously published works by New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair and the German man who ate someone he met on the Internet, had acquired Mr. Blagojevich’s book for a “six-figure” sum.

Mr. Weisfeld, who believes Mr. Blagojevich to be “100 percent innocent,” said he was pleased with the outcome. “I’m very happy with Phoenix,” he said. “I think they were the right place.”

Macmillan has so far not issued any response to Mr. Weisfeld’s lawsuit.

lneyfakh@observer.com

According to the author's literary agent, David Kuhn, Mr. von Ziegesar's memoir will not be about his famous Gossip Girl-creating half-sister Cecily any more than it will be about any of the 50 secondary characters that will populate the book.

In a February 10, New York Times profile of Mr. von Ziegesar's family that ran in the Real Estate section, Celia Barbour called Mr. von Ziegesar a "freelance writer and filmmaker" and reported that he grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, "in a household of 13 siblings, stepsiblings and cousins."

According to David Moldawer, the St. Martin’s editor who works most closely with the student editors, Let’s Go’s five-year contract with St. Martin’s was up this year, but the two decided “a few months ago” to go their separate ways. Mr. Moldawer described the move as "a change in our publishing strategy and how we see the travel book market.”

Mr. Moldawer would not elaborate on how St. Martin’s strategy has changed. But he did acknowledge that the travel guide industry has been hurt by the Internet because travelers can now get free, user-generated advice online instead of paying for an expert’s opinion.

The news comes six years after a report commissioned by St. Martin’s concluded that Let’s Go suffered from “numerous editorial weaknesses” and was “out of step” with the rest of the travel guide market. According to the Harvard Crimson, the report recommended Let’s Go shutter, rethink itself, and relaunch under a new name: “It is extremely difficult to change an image of a brand which has lost its stature as a leading brand, especially when the re-positioning is not supported by heavy marketing and advertising dollars,” the report said

According to Harvard senior Ines Pacheco, just days into her tenure as Let’s Go's Publishing Director, she and other members of the staff have been discussing alternatives for going forward after the St. Martin’s contract runs out.

“Let’s Go is not going anywhere.” Ms. Pacheco said. “We’re exploring all the usual channels. We’ll probably talk to some publishers; we’re exploring self-publishing. We’re looking at everything.”

Ms. Pacheco said the possibility of an online-only Let’s Go has not been ruled out.

A publishing consolidation of a very different sort is currently underway in downtown Manhattan: Holtzbrinck Publishers, the U.S. subsidiary of German media giant Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck and the parent of St. Martin's Press, Henry Holt and Co., and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, among others, is quietly taking over the historic Flatiron Building. According to company sources, Henry Holt and its imprints Metropolitan Books, Times Books and Owl Books will be moving from their current location at 115 West 18th Street into six recently vacated floors in the Flatiron in mid-April. They'll be joining St. Martin's, science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books, the edgy 10-year-old literary imprint Picador USA, the independent press Bloomsbury (which is distributed by Holtzbrinck), as well as Holtzbrinck's own New York headquarters, which is already located there.

Contrary to Bertelsmann's swaggering style and tendency toward large-scale corporate announcements, Holtzbrinck seems not to mind if no one notices; executives at Henry Holt declined to comment on the move, and Holtzbrinck chief executive John Sargent had only this to say:

"We've been in the Flatiron Building. We love the Flatiron Building. I don't need to comment any further."

The famous entrance at 175 Fifth Avenue still reads "Flatiron Building," not "Holtzbrinck." Here, the understatement continues: If you squint hard at the building's directory, you can read the names of the cluster of German-owned publishing houses that reside upstairs. Inside the lobby are framed archival prints of the landmark building, with historical information about its turn-of-the-century construction, as opposed to gawdy promotional posters for Jackie Collins' next book.

After signing a new lease last June that gives the company 157,500 of the building's 180,000 square feet and immediate occupancy of every floor but the seventh and eighth, Holtzbrinck executives can continue loving the Flatiron for the next 15 years. Holtzbrinck has two options in the lease to take over the remaining two floors in the future; the first can take effect in July 2007, the second in July 2009. The hodgepodge of 15 companies that currently occupy the seventh and eighth floors-including Gardner Nelson and Partners, Robert Mondavi Corp. and the oldest current tenant, Gramercy Typewriter-have leases that expire in June 2007. The commercial spaces on the two floors range from 500 to 5,000 feet, but can certainly be combined or altered to cater to the expansive publishing types. However, if Holtzbrinck declines the potential 2007 takeover, the current tenants can possibly sign new leases for two additional years.

"It's a very prestigious building and prestigious tenant," said Newmark chairman Jeff Gural, who owns the property along with Newmark principals James Kuhn and Barry Gosin and other smaller shareholders.

Renovations have been underway for several months at St. Martin's, which has occupied a portion of the building since 1959. The result is a complete transformation of the building's interiors; one rumor making the rounds of the elevators suggested that ancient safes had been unearthed in the building's crumbling walls.

Steve Cohen, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of St. Martin's Press, explained that when the Flatiron was built at the turn of the 20th century, it was designed to hold many separate businesses-the offices of entertainment agents, doctors, lawyers and the like. The result was that the floors contained "lots of pockets" and separate rooms, creating a warren-like atmosphere. The new space is open and airy, with the racetrack configuration that has become a staple in modern corporate design.

"In addition to renovating the place, we've completely upgraded all the technology and communication infrastructure with new wiring, new systems," said Mr. Cohen. "All the windows have been replaced. It's a much more comfortable building than it has been for the last 100 years."

As for the fate of the two floors which will be under option to Holtzbrinck, Mr. Cohen said: "Depending on what the company's needs are in the future, there will be the option of moving some other part of Holtzbrinck into those floors."

The question of what other unit of Holtzbrinck could possibly be slotted into those two stories in the future suggests that Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the publisher of heavyweights like Joseph Brodsky and Tom Wolfe, might be a candidate (along with other, less literary Holtzbrinck properties like Scientific American magazine). The tiny, tweedy publishing house founded in 1946 by Roger Straus is currently nestled in at 19 Union Square West-one of the last holdouts among the many high-minded publishing shops that have been pried from their dusty old homes in recent years. Even the editors at Knopf succumbed in 2002, with cigarettes in tow, to cubicle culture at 1745 Broadway.

"This option was discussed early on, and it was mutually decided that F.S.G. should stay separate," said Farrar, Straus and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi via e-mail from the London Book Fair. "We have been in our Union Square location for over 40 years and certainly have no desire or intention to move. Two floors of the Flatiron would not accommodate F.S.G. in any case."

Maintaining the company's independence was a priority when Roger Straus negotiated F.S.G.'s sale to its German owner in 1994, according to staffers and press reports.

"F.S.G. is part of the Holtzbrinck Group, needless to say, and we are in daily touch with the other members of the group and rely on central services for many functions," said Mr. Galassi. "But one of the principles of the group worldwide is the importance of autonomy for the individual publishers, and this is certainly something we appreciate and subscribe to."

For those toiling away at F.S.G., the idea of leaving the company's Union Square enclave triggers shivers of horror.

"A lot of people would be very upset," said one F.S.G. staffer who requested anonymity, referring to the possibility of a move. "It's kind of unfathomable."

It isn't easy being a playwright. First, you have to think of a play you've got to write. Then you have to write it. As if that weren't exhausting enough, I'd say the chances of an unknown dramatist getting his play produced are at least 1,000-to-1 against. Who would back such terrible odds? Only mad dogs and theater-lovers.

I've been spending a good deal of time these days writing a biography of John Osborne (who's driving me nuts), and I was fascinated to learn that when the unknown Osborne sent Look Back in Anger to the Royal Court Theatre, it was one of 750 new plays submitted that season. Imagine! In 1956-before college courses in drama were invented, before drama schools and nonprofit theater existed-there were 750 unknown dramatists in England hoping for the best.

George Devine, the Court's legendary artistic director, accepted only one of the 750 scripts, however. He handed over Look Back to his young associate director, Tony Richardson, as if holding his breath. "This might have something," he said with studied cool.

While Osborne anxiously awaited the opening of Look Back , he was given the job of the Court's first play reader, and studiously read the dog-eared manuscripts that flooded in every day. "My God!" Richardson said to him when he learned about his conscientiousness. "You don't actually read them, do you?"

Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back , was a brilliant man, but he didn't exactly read new plays-he sniffed them. His advice to Osborne was to read the first and last pages of each new play, in addition to just one other page chosen at random: "That's quite sufficient."

So you see, the playwriting game has never been easy. You have to write the thing, and then you have to somehow get it read . The play reader nowadays is usually an exhausted literary manager whose recurring nightmare is that he's going to reject a new play entitled Waiting for Godot with the recommendation, "Suitable for television." Nobody knows who these mysterious, paranoid play readers are; they inhabit the shadows, plowing through thousands of manuscripts every year in search of the mother lode.

But the odds of getting a play successfully produced are so stacked against the poor dramatist, it's a miracle he doesn't take a dose of what used to be known in England as "the dolly drops" and put an end to it all. It takes luck to be successful at anything in life, but the theater makes a fetish out of good fortune. If you can get a new play past the stage door, the producer and director have to like it next, then cast and stage it right, and even then you're in the lap of the gods. Prayer meetings are regularly held, encouraging the fickle public to love the play, as well as those miserable sods called critics. Have you seen them, the critics, crouching in the dark with their squeaky pens and unforgiving, cruel eyes?

What a bunch they are! I wouldn't be a critic if you paid me. Incidentally, I wrote a quite successful first play in younger days, but I found that I disliked it. The little play was called The Man Who Almost Knew Eamonn Andrews (its equivalent title would be The Man Who Almost Knew David Letterman ). It opened at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh-the Traverse was, and perhaps still is, a powerhouse of new drama-and the reviews were mostly extraordinarily good and generous. But I found that I disagreed with them. It's highly unusual, I know-I must be the only dramatist in the history of theater ever to disagree with a positive review of his own play.

As Percy Shelley wrote, " … to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates." This imagined thing , the play I wrote from its own wreckage, was never as I hoped and imagined it would be. Though I wrote two or three other plays, I never showed them to anyone. They always seemed to be about two tramps and a tree. But I'd had some success as a journalist by then, and thus seduced by the usual things-money, lust for power, easy sex-I gave up the playwriting game without regrets.

Will I live to regret it? Possibly . Consider this: The 70-year-old Thomas McCormack's first full-length play, Endpapers , recently opened at the Variety Arts Theatre to a number of sparkling reviews, and let's hope he agrees with them. Mr. McCormack was the editor, chairman and chief executive at St. Martin's Press (where he edited such books as Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs and James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small ). But in 1997, he left after a lifetime in publishing to do what I assume he always wanted to do, which is to write plays.

His short biography in Playbill informs us that in younger days he wrote a one-act play that gained him entrance to the Albee-Barr Playwrights Unit, where Sam Shepard, A.R. Gurney, Terrence McNally and Lanford Wilson were among his colleagues. But then he joined St. Martin's Press, and life took a different path.

Mr. McCormack's Endpapers is a smart comedy and backstage story about the hothouse politics and battles within an independent publishing house that's fighting for its life. I don't know how St. Martin's Press is doing lately, but Mr. McCormack's imagined firm is on the ropes. He knows the publishing world intimately, of course. His play rings true from the confident opening moments, when an amiable editor named Griff is reading a letter of complaint: "To the one who signs himself 'G.' I am writing to say I am tired and sick of getting those rejection letters from you. You are not a nice person. So fuck you and all your household pets."

True, the big ethical issues in Endpapers don't burn with the ferocious intensity that Jon Robin Baitz conveyed in his memorable publishing play of a few seasons ago, The Substance of Fire . (Though Mr. Baitz's second act notoriously fell apart). Mr. McCormack drifts into melodrama, too. Who will take over from Josh, the crusty old dying chairman? Will it be Ted, the ruthless shark and pragmatic heir apparent? Or will it be quiet, unpushy Griff, the editor with standards . ("Read on!", as it were).

That said, there's much to enjoy in Pamela Berlin's fizzy production, not least the fun and games that Mr. McCormack enjoys with right-to-life cookbooks and learned tomes by black lesbian abortionists. There isn't a weakness in the talented ensemble.

"Grover, tell everyone why you quit writing," the C.E.O. says to his elderly, trusty No. 2.

"Public-spirited, I guess," Grover replies dryly-not to mention that his first novel came out the same week as The Old Man and the Sea , his second the same week as Doctor Zhivago.

Welcome to the theater, Mr. McCormack!

My sister and I have a pact. If either one of us falls into a coma or is otherwise incapacitated, the other will step in to pluck her eyebrows and the occasional chin hair and to make sure her teeth are clean. We don't plan to broadcast our efforts, and we've sworn to squelch family discussion of our droolings and twitchings and the contents of our diapers. (Perhaps you have to have a family capable of such discussion to feel how we clutch at this resolution.) Call it vanity. Or dignity.

Although there are many beautiful, touching passages in John Bayley's memoir of his wife Iris Murdoch, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, I am left with the impression that Mr. Bayley has, in some way, betrayed an unspoken trust. He doesn't air the contents of her diapers, but he takes his reader placidly through the indignities of Ms. Murdoch's day, which once began with her settling at the typewriter soon after 7 but now begins with prolonged, heavy sleep and culminates in her avid watching of Teletubbies . There are several references to Ms. Murdoch's underpants, which it is now Mr. Bayley's chore to pull on and remove, as best he can, while she struggles with him vaguely. The garments function almost as a leitmotif, and underscore her loss of control over her own body.

Admirers of Ms. Murdoch's remarkable novels will still find this an engaging, even compelling account of a rather private writer. It is refreshing, though no surprise, to learn that Ms. Murdoch never read reviews of her books or gave a thought to her literary stature. When her husband, a teacher and critic, brought up aspects of her novels in conversation, she would listen to his views with polite disinterest, as if the reception of her books bore only a faint relation to their composition. "You're the critic," she would reply, smiling kindly. She did respond to letters from her readers, though, typing long and thoughtful answers to their questions, a task which has also now fallen to her husband. His disclosures of the sources for some of the characters and events in Ms. Murdoch's novels are among the best parts of this book.

Equable, affectionate, somewhat disengaged, Ms. Murdoch was never a cooking, cleaning sort of wife. Mr. Bayley remarks, with relief, that she never wanted to look after him: "[I]ndeed, one of the pleasures of living with Iris was her serenely benevolent unawareness of one's daily welfare." Another pleasure of their marriage was solitude, an apartness "that is part of the closeness, perhaps a recognition of it; certainly a pledge of complete understanding." The theme of Mr. Bayley's memoir is the loss of this separateness that had characterized their union. Their solitude, rather than the actual presence of his wife, is what he memorializes. For although "Iris Murdoch" is gone, Mr. Bayley is left with a benign companion, shuffling from room to room, repeating anxious, enigmatic queries, and trembling at his absence.

And yet, as he describes her, the Iris of the present bears a striking resemblance to the Iris of the past. She and Mr. Bayley met at Oxford in 1954, a few months before her first novel, Under the Net , was published. She was then teaching philosophy at St. Anne's College. Catching sight of her on her bicycle, in her shapeless macintosh, Mr. Bayley idealized her as "pure spirit … leading a nunlike existence in her little room in college." He recounts his subsequent alarm, when he arrived for their first date, to find her girlishly arrayed "in a sort of flame-colored brocade," with a lather of unappealing lipstick on her mouth. They fell in love that night.

The passage from friendship to romance was marked by "endless, childish chatter." "We rambled on and on," he recalls, "seeming to invent on the spot, and as we talked, a whole infantile language of our own." So serious was Ms. Murdoch's usual demeanor that Mr. Bayley relieved his jealousy of her friends and suitors–she seemed "deeply and privately attached to them all"–with the knowledge that she could not share with them this nursery language of jokes and songs.

Although not a helpful conversationalist, Ms. Murdoch was much sought-after as a friend, disseminating around her "what seemed an involuntary aura of beneficence and good will." The interest in Buddhism evident in her later novels appears to follow from these personality traits, as does her untroubled reluctance, in the end, to commit herself to any one religion or philosophy. Yet there is more to her placid nature than this gentle inwardness. Ms. Murdoch once told her husband that the question of identity always puzzled her: "She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was. I said that she must know what it was like to be oneself … as a secret and separate person–a person unknown to any other. She smiled, was amused, looked uncomprehending."

More than once, with this revelation in mind, Mr. Bayley suggests that Alzheimer's is not such a terrible fate for Ms. Murdoch. Rather than obliterating a sparkling and defiant personality, the disease seems chiefly to exaggerate what he calls her "natural goodness": "It is the persons who hug their identity most closely to themselves for whom the condition of Alzheimer's is most dreadful. Iris's own lack of a sense of identity seemed to float her more gently into its world of preoccupied emptiness."

This is a sad and loving reflection, but it can be read as the ultimate diaper-airing. For Mr. Bayley's portrayal of his wife is rooted in the present. He even remarks at one point that he seems to have lost his memory, as well, and that he can hardly recall his wife as she was before the illness. What he remembers best, it is clear, is their simple, childish fun. These memories help him link the vacant figure before him with the woman he married, so that his physical care for her, washing and dressing and putting to bed, seems to find a comforting basis in the past.

Yet his need to find continuity in his wife's personality before and after the illness has made him emphasize her blandness, her long silences, her "goodness." And he presents her, from the beginning of the book, in her current diminished condition, so that the reader, too, cannot picture her as any different. Each of his later descriptions of their trips together, or their conversations, is overpowered by his images of her arranging bits of trash around the house and refusing to be undressed for her bath, as if she showed, even as a young woman, a sort of latent Alzheimer's.

As the first significant biography of Iris Murdoch, from the person closest to her, Mr. Bayley's account will weigh heavily in subsequent books about her. The final five or six years of her life may come to epitomize certain character traits, certain tendencies in her novels. But this is a sickbed memoir, grossly limited and limiting. While Mr. Bayley offers an intimate view of his senile wife, he cannot offer a portrait of a brilliant and esteemed writer–the Iris, presumably, for whom one would write an elegy.