Last November, no horse-racing metaphors were spared in describing Jaimy Gordon’s unlikely NBA Award win for Lord of Misrule, a bawdy, vividly imagined novel set at a down-and-out horse track in 1970s West Virginia, which beat out favorites from Nicole Krauss and Peter Carey. The book’s publisher, Bruce McPherson, had “played a hunch” in making a “late entry” into NBA competition. Indeed, Gordon’s win was against the odds, perhaps the biggest longshot to win the fiction prize since Tim O’Brien (Cacciato) bested John Irving (Garp) in 1979.

But the racing metaphors refuse to go away. To wit: Gordon’s epigraph to the book—“Without claiming races there would be no racing at all. Owners would avoid the hazards of fair competition,” a quote from Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing—has proven oddly prescient. In horse-racing parlance, a claiming race is one in which an entered horse is for sale to anyone for a set price: they make a claim. Publishing’s version—whereby a small press backs an unknown writer only to have a big house “claim” her—is, loosely, what happened to Lord of Misrule. As was widely reported on the night of the National Book Award ceremony, a young associate editor at Vintage, Tim O’Connell, had struck a deal with Gordon through her new agent Bill Clegg: $25,000 for the reprint rights to Lord of Misrule and a $100,000 bonus if the book won the award, plus a provision that the paperback would come out at the end of the first quarter in 2011. And sure enough, tomorrow (Mar. 8), a mere four months after it was published in hardcover, Lord of Misrule will be trotted out in a 75,000-copy first printing by Vintage.

Tough luck for McPherson & Co., which had its biggest book ever? Not quite. For McPherson, a savvy veteran of small press publishing who has kept his one-man shop vital since the mid-’70s, published carefully. His planned 2,000-copy first printing was upped to 8,000 when the nomination was made public, and when Gordon walked away with the prize, a second printing of 25,000 was ordered, followed by a third of 12,000—all within six weeks. How has it turned out? “Returns have been minimal,” said McPherson from his home office in Kingston, N.Y. “I have been able to shift the returns. Anything I have gotten back has gone out. I still have orders.” Such a success has made a world of difference for McPherson. “It raised my profile, for one thing, and I’m having very good success selling foreign rights,” which he had divided with the agent. “I’ve sold Germany, Italy, and am working on France, Spain, and Portugal myself; Bill sold the U.K. rights to Quercus.” As for the competition in stores between the $25 McPherson & Co. hardcover and the $15 Vintage paperback, McPherson is hopeful that the hardcover will become “the gift item” and that his 45,000 in-print inventory will completely sell-through.

Publishing literary novels is a risky business, whether at a small press like McPherson’s or a large New York house. O’Connell, who started at Vintage in 2006, seems nervy enough, putting down a $25,000 offer on an as-yet unpublished book and adding a six-figure bonus should it win. “Bill Clegg called me about Lord of Misrule late last October, shortly after the NBA nomination,” O'Connell told PW.“I knew right away that I was dealing with something special. I knew it was the kind of thing I had to print out and begin reading at my desk, no matter how much the phone rang."

Clegg also sent along manuscript pages from Gordon’s novel-in-progress, Picnic, which O’Connell also bought, for Pantheon, with a similar bonus kicking in to the advance should Lord of Misrule win. In the course of all this, O’Connell read Gordon’s whole backlist. “She reinvents herself with each outing,” he concluded. “Shamp of the City-Solo is a comic fantasy novel. She Drove Without Stopping is a riveting road novel. Bogeywoman, which Vintage is also reissuing, in September, is a startling coming-of-age novel.”

Vintage is convinced that it can build the audience for Gordon in paperback. “Our track record is strong on this front,” said O’Connell, “and Jaimy’s work is particularly suited to the Vintage list, where she will join a storied backlist of award-winning authors like Faulkner and McCarthy.” O’Connell was also encouraged by a recent Gordon call-in interview on NPR, where it was clear that many of the callers were people who loved thoroughbred racing and have been waiting for a book to capture what the sport is really like. “It is just one of the magical books that I think will find new markets for years to come,” said O’Connell.

Although Gordon, now 66, has been touring extensively since the NBA Award, Vintage is continuing the push, with more than 30 dates planned between March and October. Bogeyman, first published by Sun & Moon in 1999 and a L.A. Times Best Book but long out of print, will appear as a Vintage paperback in September. All this is good for McPherson, who continues to sell his Gordon backlist—Shamp of the City-Solo, which launched him as a publisher in 1974, and the well-regarded She Drove without Stopping, which McPherson has had in print since 1993. “I’ve sold hundreds of both books since November,” said McPherson, “and I expect them both to do well over the next year or two, as Jaimy’s readership expands.”

Asked how she feels about the sudden acclaim and new big-house affiliation after a long career with smaller presses, Gordon is philosophical. “I thank the gods of mischief,” she wrote in an e-mail to PW. “If Lord of Misrule had come out from a large house, would it have been nominated by a madly optimistic editor like Bruce McPherson for the National Book Award? What are the odds that a big-time press with a large stable of well-known authors would have seen Lord of Misrule as this year’s, or any year’s, big one? Not worth a two-dollar bet. Its great good luck actually depended, in the end, on its making its way before the judges in its dark-horse silks, with that quixotic little banner emblazoned on the cover, 'Nominated by the publisher for the National Book Award.' The one thing that probably guarantees some longevity for Lord of Misrule beyond my own lifespan, is not that it was claimed by a big press, nor that it landed on the bestseller shelf in an airport bookstore, but that it won the National Book Award. And it’s my theory that that good luck depended, oddly enough, on Lord of Misrule’s small press origins.”