Jonathan Galassi, publisher and president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux is leaving behind the bookish borough of Brooklyn for this sunny, Greenwich Village co-op.

The publisher and poet sold his breathtakingly beautiful Carroll Gardens townhouse for $2.3 million in February after divorcing from his wife Susan Grace Galassi, a curator at the Frick, at the end of 2011.

Mr. Galassi paid $1.7 million for the two-bedroom bachelor pad, according to city records, listed for $1.75 with Corcoran broker Paula Manikowski.

The apartment, while decorated in a manner befitting its former occupant, Annabel Teal, the young Johnson & Johnson heiress (lavender walls, a custom-made vanity and what appear to customized closets perfect for storing party frocks), is a bright, airy space.

The apartment boasts inlaid herringbone floors, original moldings, a fireplace and a marble-floored bathroom, according to the listing. There's  also an impressive kitchen with lots of high-end appliances and fixtures and a wine cooler (an essential for those hosting literary gatherings).

Not one to wallow in heartbreak, Mr. Galassi has plenty of projects to keep him busy these days. Besides running a huge publishing house, he's also trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy and a translator of Italian poetry. He just recently published a book of his own poetry.

As for Annabel Teal, the deed shows that she's moved on to a palatial, family-owned 48th-floor condo in the Trump Tower. No longer on the market, the tiger-carpeted apartment was most recently listed at $24 million.

And if she tires of the Trump Tower, there's always her mom, Libet Johnson's place—in one of the Vanderbilt mansions.

kvelsey@observer.com

Blanche, left, favored Dior couture.

On Monday Farrar, Straus and Giroux acquired a biography of Blanche Knopf—the wife of Alfred A. Knopf, founder and namesake of Random House's rival literary imprint—by Laura Claridge.

“What’s fascinating about it is this writer has access to a tremendous cache of papers,” FSG executive editor Ileene Smith told The Observer yesterday.

Although she was reluctant to reveal more about the project, first reported by Publishers Marketplace, Ms. Smith told us that Ms. Claridge (who has written biographies of Emily Post, Norman Rockwell, and Art Deco painter Tamara De Lempicka) inherited papers collected over more than twenty-five years by two previous intended biographers of the Knopfs. The first was Susan Sheehan, veteran New Yorker writer and author of Pulitzer-winning Is There No Place on Earth For Me?

After working on a Knopf biography for many years, Ms. Sheehan abandoned the project and gave the papers to Peter Prescott, the longtime book critic for Newsweek who died in 2004. His family gave the materials to Ms. Claridge.

Unlike previous attempts, Ms. Smith explained, Ms. Claridge's is the first to focus on Blanche. Although she is largely overshadowed by her husband’s legacy, Blanche founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. alongside Alfred, serving as director and vice president.

“That angle into the Knopf story is a particularly interesting one,” Ms. Smith said.

In the few articles written about her, Blanche is credited with luring the European giants like Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and André Gide (as well as the Americans like John Updike and H.L. Mencken) who established the house’s literary credentials. Plus, the native New Yorker was so stylish we're surprised the film rights haven't already been bought. Blanche was fluent in French, wore haute couture, lived off salads and martinis and selected the house's Borzoi trademark, which she regretted after owning a pair of the Russian wolfhounds, according to the Knopf Archive at the University of Texas.

The project—bought in a pre-empt from the Carol Mann Agency—is Mr. Smith’s first acquisition for FSG, which she joined from Yale University Press in February. At Yale and, before that, at Random House, Ms. Smith acquired Janet Malcolm’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Two Lives; Azar Nafisi’s Nabokov scholarship; and Eve Ensler The Good Body.

There’s good cause for the admiration: hired in 2007 to start an eponymous imprint at Putnam, Ms. Einhorn’s first fiction acquisition, published in early 2009, was a debut novel by an unknown writer about maids and housewives in Jackson, Miss. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is still at the top of the bestseller lists. Across all formats it has sold 10 million copies in the United States. And following this auspicious start, Ms. Einhorn has launched a bestselling novel every February. In 2010 it was Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress. In 2011 it was Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters. Her release for this year, Alex George’s The Good American, has already been named the top February pick by Indie Bound, the organization of independent booksellers.

“She has such a good sense of a book that a lot of people will like,” said Claire Zion, editorial director at NAL, who hired Ms. Einhorn as her assistant at the Simon & Schuster imprint Pocket Books in the 1990s. “She came with that—it’s like her curly hair and hazel eyes—it arrived with the package.”

To attribute all of Ms. Einhorn’s success to her uncanny good taste, however, is to overlook the ways in which her business strategies as a publisher have been shaped by coming of age in the publishing industry at a time of great change: her avoidance of big names for debut or little-known writers belies her commitment to starting small and growing big; her conservative approach to growing her list in a way that might result in a loss of control or excessive overhead shows a wariness about an industry that is as quick to kill new imprints as start them. All this focus on the ephemeral quality “good taste” also undermines those of Ms. Einhorn’s talents that have always been essential to successful publishing: a commitment to thorough editing and a lot of exuberant salesmanship.

Like the books she publishes, Ms. Einhorn’s career has spanned both the commercial and the literary. After graduating from Stanford, she  moved to New York in 1990 to start her first job in the industry, as Elisabeth Dyssegaard’s assistant at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Remembering it today, Ms. Einhorn does not have a particularly nostalgic view of her publishing past: on the day of her interview, she was dismayed to find there was no toilet paper in the office bathroom. Roger Straus, not in the habit of learning assistants’ names, would tug Ms. Einhorn’s ponytail to get her attention. To supplement her salary of $13,000 a year, she cleaned apartments on weekends, including that of FSG’s subsidiary rights director Judy Klein.

“If you needed a new pencil you’d have to go down to the supply room and there was this little woman Rose who was like four feet tall and you’d say you needed a new pencil,” Ms. Einhorn remembered. “She’d say, ‘Come show me your pencil.’ You’d show her and she’d say, ‘You still have two inches left. You can’t get a new one.’”

But Ms. Einhorn, who had majored in creative writing, still found some glamor in the industry. Jonathan Franzen was “the tall guy on the softball team,” Rick Moody was an associate editor and Jonathan Galassi was just publishing Michael Cunningham.

“You had a bunch of trust fund kids and then you had these other people who just sort of drank the Kool-Aid and worked at FSG,” she said.

After FSG, Ms. Einhorn ascended to positions at Villard and then Poseidon, the imprint Simon & Schuster had started for Ann Patty, the editor who had discovered V.C. Andrews.

“She was very bright and had just the most lovely manners,” said Ms. Patty, who now has her own business as an editorial consultant and book doctor. “She was bubbly without being obnoxious, she was energetic and she was clearly very bright without being snobby.” Ms. Einhorn also had what Ms. Patty called a “roll up your sleeves and do what you need to do” quality.

Poseidon’s list was a mix of commercial and literary titles, including books by writers like Siri Hustvedt, Mary Gaitskill and Steven Millhauser. Typing up Ms. Patty’s editorial notes, which the publisher recorded on a Dictaphone to save her assistants the task of deciphering her handwriting, proved to be Ms. Einhorn’s first education in editing. Then came her first lesson in corporate fickleness.

“I came home from vacation and my dad was in the hospital with complications from open heart surgery and Ann left me a message saying ‘I’m not going to be at work because I was fired, call me,’” said Ms. Einhorn.

In 1993, Simon & Schuster shuttered Poseidon.

“Everyone was fired except for me,” said Ms. Einhorn. “Not because I was great, but because they forgot I existed, literally.”

A spare wheel in the midst of a company-wide hiring freeze, she survived to transfer to another S&S imprint, Pocket Books. There, under the tutelage of Claire Zion, her indoctrination into the commercial side of the business began in earnest.

“The first time I was in Claire’s office, she explained to me the difference between a romance novel and a shopping-and-fucking novel...and then she started talking about Regency romances,” Ms. Einhorn said. While she had worked on commercial books before, her reading preferences still tended towards the literary—both Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp and Ms. Einhorn’s husband, Matthew Futterman, recalled that when they first met Ms. Einhorn, she was, as Mr. Karp put it, “under the spell of Norman Rush’s Mating.”

“It was really good to go to Pocket but it was really weird because it was crazy commercial and I just didn’t know anything about it,” Ms. Einhorn said.

She quickly adapted. Her first ever acquisition was the autobiography of QVC infomercial host Kathy Levine. The project was Ms. Einhorn’s idea. The book, It’s Better to Laugh... Life, Good Luck, Bad Hair Days and QVC, sold 150,000 copies. She was soon promoted to editorial director of another S&S imprint, Washington Square Press.

In 1997, Ms. Einhorn, still just 29, moved to then-Warner Books to assume the position of executive editor of its trade paperback program. She soon began acquiring hardcover titles—and bestsellers—including Amy Sedaris’s I Like You, Robert Hicks’s The Widow of the South, Lolly Winston’s Good Grief and Susan Jane Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress—and rose to the position of hardcover editor-in-chief at Grand Central Publishing (the company changed names after Warner Books was acquired by the Hachette Livre in 2006). But in 2007, when Putnam president Ivan Held approached her about the possibility of starting an imprint, Ms. Einhorn was ready to go.

“I’d been there ten years, I love the people there, I still have many friends and I learned a lot but this was just a great opportunity to do something new and to have something where I could be more in control and have my hand in every aspect on the process in the way I couldn’t overseeing such a huge list,” she said.

Meeting for an interview in her office at Penguin, with its framed copies of past bestseller lists on the wall and shelves full of various editions of The Help and other books from her imprint, Ms. Einhorn was as jovial and good-humored as her colleagues had described her. (“Her curls bounce!” said the literary agent Stephanie Cabot.) For Ms. Einhorn, involving herself in every aspect of the process is not just talk. She paused the interview to approve a new cover for a forthcoming novel, The Gods of Gotham, by a writer named Lyndsay Faye—Ms. Einhorn had requested a last-minute redesign to add an enthusiastic blurb from Michael Connelly. And while The Help is a publishing phenomenon, its success was not without coaxing: Ms. Einhorn carefully cultivated relationships with booksellers and, unusually for a hardcover release, book clubs. She points out that the book took six weeks to hit bestseller lists.

“We usually don’t have a relationship or even know who the heck the editor is,” said Jake Reiss, owner of The Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, Ala., where Kathryn Stockett did her first reading of The Help. With Ms. Einhorn, he said, it was different.

Ms. Einhorn, who said she applies the publishing equivalent of Tip O’Neill’s aphorism that “all politics is local,” includes a special note to booksellers in galley editions of books with her phone number and e-mail address. She collects and circulates bookseller quotes (The Help amassed 40 of them). She is big on handwritten thank you notes and hounds her writers to send them. Booksellers, like New York publishing executives, have come to trust her taste, and at least one book blogger has issued a challenge to read all of the books her imprint publishes.

“She’s made a believer out of us,” said Mr. Reiss. “You don’t have to hold a hot pot very long to believe it’s hot.”

No publisher has a perfect track record -- Ms. Einhorn calls her first two acquisitions for the imprint, both memoirs about family tragedies, “rookie mistakes”: good reads but tough sells.

“I need to be able to convince you in thirty seconds of speaking to make you want to read the book,” she said. She said she received around 1,000 submissions in her first year at the imprint, and does not spend much time on manuscripts that do not draw her in from the first page. “I’d worked at places where we’d published some incredibly beautiful line-by-line novels but there was this sort of MFA navel-gazing aspect to them and they didn’t sell, so I knew I didn’t want to do that.”

But The Help was also an unlikely pick. By her count, Kathryn Stockett had already been rejected by 60 agents over three years before she was picked up by Susan Ramer. Ms. Einhorn bought the book as a pre-empt, after being drawn in, she said, by a line in the first paragraph where one of the black maids, speaking in a dialect that has raised objections from some readers, says she is raising her seventeenth white child.

“Her first round of edits were so thorough and she wasn’t editing electronically,” said Ms. Stockett by phone from her home in Atlanta. “She said, ‘There will be some sticky notes attached.’ I got this manuscript back—I even thanked her in the acknowledgements—there were so many sticky notes! Four or five on a page, times 500. She was saving the sticky note business from bankruptcy.”

Ms. Einhorn is known for such extensive editing—and even for rejecting manuscripts that she later buys, including The Good American and the Times bestseller The Postmistress. To both authors she sent unusually detailed rejection letters with editing suggestions.

“Her rejection letter got me thinking of ways to cut and refigure,” said Sarah Blake, who wrote The Postmistress. Six weeks after turning Ms. Blake’s book down, Ms. Einhorn reconsidered and bought it. Alex George resubmitted his manuscript a year after his rejection, after following Ms. Einhorn’s suggestions.

So much for the lamentations that nobody in New York edits anymore. “I kind of get bummed when people say that,” she said. “I just think it’s an easy thing to say.”

Mr. Eugenides has a long essay up at The Millions today about writing The Marriage Plot, but we're more interested in the wisdom dispensed by the vest. It really gets around town.

Tranströmer.

When Barbara Epler received the news last week that Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she had one reaction: “I said, ‘Call the printers!’" she recalled.

Ms. Epler is the president of New Directions, publisher of Mr. Tranströmer’s The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, an anthology translated by the Scottish poet Robin Fulton. For New Directions, Mr. Tranströmer’s win was big news -- by Friday its book was ranked #12 on Amazon, a rarity for the independent publisher, which is known for its commitment to publishing difficult poetry and literature in translation.

“For a poetry book to be number 12 that just kills me,” said Ms. Epler, adding that while Mr. Tranströmer “sells perfectly well in our terms” the spike in sales last week was positively “stratospheric.” In response, New Directions quickly arranged to have an additional 1,500 copies of The Great Enigma printed for shipment by tomorrow, forcing its short run publisher to work through the Columbus Day holiday. Another 8,000 copies will follow in a few weeks.

In Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, the independent publisher of The Half-finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, selected and translated by the poet Robert Bly, celebrated the award with scones and muffins. Then they went to work. “We were all pretty busy actually,” said Graywolf publicity director Erin Kottke. “We didn’t have time to really revel in it because we were scrambling to figure out what the next step was.” Graywolf’s reprint is now also underway: 10,000 copies with a Nobel Prize sticker on the cover for release in three weeks and a planned second printing with an amended cover to follow.

The third publisher with the works of Tomas Tranströmer on its backlist is Ecco, whose publisher, Daniel Halpern, first published the poet in 1987 when Ecco was still independent. Today Ecco is an imprint of HarperCollins books, and by Friday morning the publisher had announced that it would be reissuing its two titles, For the Living and the Dead: a Memoir and Poems and Selected Poems, edited by the poet Robert Hass. With the resources of a massive publishing house behind it, Ecco’s reissued books will have redesigned covers and be ready for sale by the end of this week.

Mr. Halpern, who expects Ecco's books to sell some 15,000 copies, was listening to NPR in the shower when the news broke. He told The Observer that the award was unexpected but that the poet was an old favorite. “Tranströmer should have gotten it 25 years ago and in no way is this some obscure Scandinavian,” he said. “Everybody thinks it’s a really righteous prize.”

So now that everybody is reprinting Mr. Tranströmer’s work, the question remains: which version should you buy? Well, that depends. New Directions’ The Great Enigma is the most comprehensive volume, a collected poems that includes a half-century’s worth of books rather than a careful selection. Its translator, Robin Fulton, is a Scottish poet who has lived in Norway since 1973. (The New York Times reprinted two of his translations here).

“Of course I would say that I think it’s the best translation, but I really do,” said Ms. Epler. “And the way New Directions works, we’re a small independent publisher and any profits we make go into publishing more poetry books.”

Graywolf’s collection of the “best poems,” The Half-Finished Heaven, was first published in 2001. Its poems were selected and translated by the poet Robert Bly, a good friend of Mr. Tranströmer who was also one of the Swedish poet’s earliest American advocates and translators of his work into English. “Robert Bly was early on in terms of translating Tranströmer and sort of influential,” said Ross Shideler, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ecco’s Selected Poems was first published in 1987 and edited by the poet Robert Hass. Rather than rely upon a single translator, Mr. Halpern said Mr. Hass reviewed all the translations available at the time and selected what he thought were the best.

“He worked with a Swedish-speaking person and when he needed to get a reading for tone or literal content he relied on her,” said Mr. Halpern. “He selected the translations of individual poems he felt were the strongest and if they had a problem they were revised.” Dr. Shideler called Mr. Hass’s Selected Poems, “a really fine collection.”

Ecco’s other book, For the Living and the Dead, is also included in the New Directions anthology, but the Ecco version includes a short prose memoir by Mr. Tranströmer. FSG will be publishing its own collection, The Deleted World, with translations by Robin Robertson, later this year.*

One thing about Mr. Tranströmer that all the publishers seemed to agree on is that he is a poet that translates successfully. “One of the reasons for that is because his poetry is so concrete and solid and visual even as he moves into these very abstract kinds of things,” said Dr. Shideler. “Anybody in English-speaking countries who knows something about poetry really knows about Tranströmer.”

As an example of Mr. Tranströmer’s appeal, Dr. Shideler said that on Thursday morning he got a call from a former student who simply read out one of the prize winner's poems over the phone. “And this is a guy who does Brazilian literature,” he said.

*Given that Mr. Tranströmer's translators/editors all seem to be named Robin (Fulton) or Robert (Bly, Hass), a translator named Robin Robertson seems uniquely designed to confuse scholars of Scandinavian literature.

Train, in vain.

Last week, The Observer discovered that before Middlesex writer Jeffrey Eugenides got socked in the face on NJ Transit, he enjoyed a $520 meal -- complete with wine, cocktails, and deep conversation -- from celebrated Central Park seafood spot Marea. His partner for the night was Farrar, Straus & Giroux head honcho Jonathan Galassi. They ate a lot of fancy fish and probably enjoyed themselves!

It's too bad, then, that the author of this Fall's anticipated novel The Marriage Plot got pelted by a guy screaming a song about his testicles.

We obtained a receipt indicated what contributed to the massive dinner bill, but our info on the drama on board the train was limited to the source that reached out to Page Six (Mr. Eugenides declined to comment).

Limited, that is, until today. An eyewitness reached out to The Observer to set the record straight on the goons abusing Mr. Eugenides and his car-mates. The whole obscenity-laden scene is a bit more, um, fleshed out now.

Our man on the scene is a 29-year-old who works in real estate. He was headed to his central New Jersey home from the city after finishing a class at NYU and a "night out with a lady."

The tipster, who asked that we not disclose his name, was seated a few seats away from the writer. Like the hostess at Marea, he had no idea who the man was. Man, it's tough being a writer these days! You'd think that if Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett starred in the movie adapted from your book, you'd get a few head turns, right?

Here's the start of the tale:

Myself and my date were seated a few seats away from the gentleman –- who never identified himself throughout the ordeal, nor did anyone know who he was, although we found it odd that he was wearing a scarf in 90 degree weather –- the sign of a mentally disturbed person –- or a putlizer [sic] prize winner...

Style takes sacrifice, tipster! OK, sorry, go on:

The group was a bunch of 4 teenagers – no older than 21, two men, two women, the two men were highly inebriated, the women were screaming before they sat down “oh boy this is going to be a crazy ride” clearly they all had a combined IQ no higher than 10, and probably have no idea what a Pulitzer Prize is, nor how to pronounce it. The Twitter user is just merely using the situation to incite his apparent disdain for Mr Eugenides. Their MO during the entire trip was cursing (not just about their genitals) and they were told numerous times to be quiet by the passengers on the train, particularly because there were children all over the place.. Apparently Mr Eugenides had enough and smacked the cell phone out of their hand.. The drunk got up in his face, and was confronting him when suddenly he punched him in the face, then his whole group ran away to another car. When the train stopped at Newark Penn Station, the doors were not opened until NJ Transit police got there and they apprehended the suspect. The NJ Transit Police asked numerous bystanders in the car to identify the assailant and everyone pointed out the correct person.

So it appears justice has been served. The witness also insisted that the Twitter user who fessed up to the crime -- “@cyberhack7” -- was a fake, as the attackers were four in number and had no animus toward the author regarding his work.

And despite apathy toward the guy's novels -- "I had never heard of Mr Eugenides... nor do I really care" -- the witness reiterated Paris Review editor Lorin Stein's claim that the man had proved himself a hero.

"I just feel bad for the nice guy who was just trying to keep peace and got fed up on a NJ Transit Train," the witness said.

As for Mr. Eugenides, we do hope he's recovering. Unlike others involved here, we do care about his fiction. As soon as our editor finishes his galley of Marriage Plot (hurry, dude!) we'll tear right into it.

The show was scheduled to start at 7; by 7:05, Samovar proprietor Roman Kaplan had placed a velvet rope at the stairs to the entrance. The reading was full, he insisted: No one else would be permitted to enter. Not even to stand! Fire codes! He looked fearsome and smoked a cigarette.

Would-be guests seemed baffled.

"It's like a club," said one rebuffed girl.

A club with a tough door. Chantal Clarke of FSG, who had organized the event, reported that novelist Donald Antrim and n+1 editor Marco Roth were among those turned away.

"They took it very good-naturedly!" Clarke said in an email.

For all those who didn't make it in: Means read "The Blade," from his recent collection The Spot, and Davis read a sampling of new and unpublished work. It included pieces based on dreams, errors, Flaubert's correspondence, and cows.

The collection, edited by Peter Terzian and published by Harper Perennial, features an essay by Mr. Wood on the Who and one by Mr. Sullivan on early blues. It also contains a piece by Josh Ferris on Pearl Jam, Benjamin Kunkel on The Smiths, Colm Tóibín on Joni Mitchell, and 15 others.

The Bryant Park event will consist of two sets—one starting at 12:10 and a second at 1:30—bookending a discussion with contributors Mr. Ferris, Clifford Chase, Stacey D'Erasmo and Asali Solomon that will be led by Mr. Terzian.

"John's been sending me MP3s of his songs for the past couple years, both home recordings and ones he's done with his band, and they're just beautiful and heartbreaking," said Mr. Terzian in an email. "He's now totally one of my favorite singer-songwriters as well as one of my favorite writers. And anyone who's seen James's finger-drumming video knows he's a virtuoso. From the beginning I wanted to organize a Heavy Rotation event with a musical performance. I never dreamed I'd end up with a supergroup."

Lorin Stein, Mr. Wood's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had this to add: "The first time I met James he lectured me on the greatness of Stewart Copeland and Keith Moon. Copeland AND Moon, you know? Both/and, not either/or. That's the kind of critic he is."

Maxim and Blender will be the chief beneficiaries of the new owners' money and time from now on, with plans to increase the rate-base for Blender, the music and lifestyle magazine, to 1 million by January 2009.

Maxim will get "Stuff for Men" as a section of the magazine, now that the title no longer has to compete with FHM magazine, the other lad-shopping mag.

• Adweek: 'Stuff' Folds Into 'Maxim'
• New York Times: New Owner to Combine Men's Magazines

In other media news:

Ziff Davis media is trying to restructure $390 M. in debt (Keith Kelly)

ABC does some downsizing in its D.C. bureau (FishbowlDC)

Goldmans, Browns in feud over O.J. book deal (MSNBC.com/Today)

Ryan Seacrest will host the Superbowl on Fox (Variety.com)

FSG to face firestorm over controversial Israel book (newyorktimes.com)

Get ready for the Book of Rove: Washington macher is already on the case (Publishers Weekly)