Bantam Dell

The time bomb that was Random House for the past five months has finally exploded, as new C.E.O. Markus Dohle deployed a jaw-dropping memo this morning detailing a reorganization of the adult trade program that will see Bantam publisher Irwyn Applebaum and Doubleday publisher Steve Rubin step down and their imprints spread around to the company's other divisions.

Much, much more on this soon, but for now, the basics:

—Doubleday's flagship imprint and its Nan A. Talese unit will fall under the command of Sonny Mehta at Knopf.

—Crown will incorporate Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion, and WaterBrook Multnomah, with Crown publisher Jenny Frost presiding over all of them.  read more »

Here’s a fairytale: A 28-year-old Columbia M.F.A. student named Reif Larsen wrote a novel about a whimsical child from Montana who likes maps, and suddenly all kinds of famous editors in New York were calling his agent, Denise Shannon, and telling her they really wanted to publish it.

Norton offered to preempt with an advance in the neighborhood of $400,000 if Ms. Shannon took the book off the market and sold it to the publisher right then and there. The editorial director of Dial Press, an imprint of Random House’s Bantam Dell Doubleday group, offered to pay half a million for the same privilege.  read more »