So here we are, a week before BEA, and the game of musical chairs—and the guessing game that always goes with it—has begun. While Random House still has no official announcement about Peter Olson's departure, the talk has shifted from why him to when him, and then to who next? Meanwhile, ex-Random hotshot Don Weisberg—who “retired” last year—has just turned up as the head of Penguin's children's division. Those are the big stories, and the chatter has been loud enough to drown out a question that has been circulating around New York publishing for months. To wit: what's going on at Bloomsbury?
The rumble started some months ago when the Macmillan-distributed house that was founded ten years ago as an adjunct to the U.K. version (a.k.a. the house that Harry Potter built) began to contract; several staffers were laid off, including the much admired Annik LaFarge. A few months later, publisher Karen Rinaldi, who by all accounts built the house, moved, surprisingly, to Rodale, as publishing director. Then, one of Bloomsbury's top authors—chef—at-large Anthony Bourdain, a longtime friend of Rinaldi—left too. He went to Ecco, which has long published his Kitchen Confidential and other of his books in paperback, for a generous three-book deal.
So you can see why publishing watchers wondered the worst: is Bloomsbury USA going to fold?
The question makes Richard Charkin, the newly installed president of Bloomsbury U.S.A., laugh. “Nothing could be further from our minds,” says the guy who gave up his job as Macmillan CEO in the U.K. as well as his popular snarky blog on which he was never shy about his feelings about trade publishing, to work with his friend Nigel Newton at Bloomsbury PLC. “At a time when we'll be able to bid for world English rights, it would be foolish not to have an American division.”
Oh, right, globalization: everybody's doing it. Now, more than ever, Bloomsbury can work its international corporate magic on the English-speaking world by buying world English rights (agents, beware!) and publishing simultaneously. Case in point: early this month, Bloomsbury's new executive editor, Anton Mueller, late of Houghton Mifflin, signed a “major” two-book deal with Anchee Min (The Last Empress, etc.) and plans to release in the U.K. and U.S. on the same day and to “coordinate trans-Atlantic promotional campaigns.” Recent common wisdom may hold that what works on one side of the pond doesn't necessarily work on the other (e.g., Jed Rubenfeld's 2006 The Interpretation of Murder from Holt), but Bloomsbury, ever the upstart, is bucking it: a few weeks ago, a veddy veddy British book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a 19th-century murder mystery, landed on several bestseller lists stateside.
Which maybe shouldn't have been such a surprise. This is, after all, the same house that imported Schott's Miscellany and turned it into a blockbuster here, selling, according to Nielsen BookScan, over 160,000 copies since its 2003 pub. Will the new one, Schott's Miscellany 2008: An Almanac—and/or a new book one of these days from Susanna (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) Clarke—help save Bloomsbury? Who knows. For now, Bloomsbury publisher Colin Dickerman says, “We're doing fine over here.” Or as another very American writer might have put it, just this once, the rumors of a publisher's death may have been greatly exaggerated.
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