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The Beginning of the London Book Fair Neither heat (of the hall), nor rain of protests (from anti-Reed agitators) nor dimness of wireless Internet access (which barely worked, or didn’t work at all) could delay the London Book Fair from making its move to new quarters and once again welcoming publishers from the around the world to trade rights and more. Around the world is still the operative phrase for Sunday, where one longstanding tradition — in which many of London’s most prominent editors and executive elect not to attend — appears to be as vibrant as ever. The aisles […]

Schedules and Such Weather permitting, Lunch heads to London tonight, and will not be published tomorrow. We will post regularly from the Fair, both at PublishersMarketplace.com and via e-mail, though the exact schedule always comes together on the fly. We’ll have a big deal round-up ready on Sunday night as usual, and constant deal reports as news comes in. (As noted earlier, there should be market-priced wireless Internet access at Excel, so feel free to post deal bulletins while you’re at the show.) I’ve received about a dozen e-mails with different versions of schedules of LBF seminars and events and […]

Baron Adds a Second Job; Borders UK Gets a New Chief In addition to her current role as publishing director at Bookspan, Carole Baron will now acquire and edit books for Knopf, too. Prior to joining Bookspan last year, Baron had been president at Putnam and Dutton. In the topsy-turvy world of British chain bookselling, Borders UK has appointed David Roche as CEO of the unit. Roche had been product director at competitor Waterstone’s until last year. (He left, ostensibly in order to become ceo of Ottakar’s, which never happened after the proposed management buyout failed.) The company’s previous top […]

Personnel News and Announcements Jason Pinter is moving from Warner after two and a half years there, to become an editor at Three Rivers Press, starting next week. Terra Chalberg is moving to Simon Spotlight Entertainment, where she will be an associate editor. She started at Scribner in 2002 and then worked at Simon & Schuster. Michele Matrisciani will join HCI as editorial director in early March. She has specialized in self-help, psychology, health, women’s issues and diet and fitness books at McGraw-Hill. On the corporate side, MacAdam/Cage has announced a “strategic relationship” with Random House Canada, under which they […]

Penguin Nudges Up For Year Penguin joins the ranks of publishing industry companies delighted to show a gain of one or two percentage points for the year, with sales of 804 million pounds ($1.399 billion) up two percent from last year’s soft year of 786 million pounds, and up one percent on a currency-adjusted “underlying” basis. Operating profit was up four percent on an underlying basis, to 60 million pounds ($104 million). The company expects “to grow at a similar rate to 2005, with margins improving steadily as we benefit from efficiency gains.” Penguin USA CEO David Shanks says that […]

FICTION Debut Laureen Vonnegut’s first novel, OASIS, set in Morocco, a fever dream of a novel spun from the threads of murder, survival, conspiracy and rebirth that centers around a Russian beauty, her dead Moroccan husband, and an endless stretch of desert punctuated by a tiny oasis of bizarre and untrustworthy characters, to Amy Scheibe at Counterpoint, for publication in October 2006, by Joe Regal at Regal Literary (world). Journalist Nicholas Kulish’s LAST ONE IN, in which a New York City tabloid’s war correspondent is hit by a truck in Manhattan just as the war in Iraq is about to […]