BOOK PUBLISHING IN BIG TROUBLE

Jason Boog, Salon - The end of days is here for the publishing industry -- or it sure seems like it. On Dec. 3, now known as "Black Wednesday," several major American publishers were dramatically downsized, leaving many celebrated editors and their colleagues jobless. The bad news stretches from the unemployment line to bookstores to literature itself. . .

One of the most visible victims was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher of Philip Roth, Margaret Drabble, Richard Dawkins and J.R.R. Tolkien, among many others. Just before Thanksgiving, the publisher (actually two venerable houses, Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, which were bought and merged by an Irish company over the past two years) had announced an unprecedented buying freeze on new manuscripts. On Dec. 3, they laid off what former executive editor Ann Patty described as "a lot" of employees (the industry trade publication Publishers Weekly confirmed at least eight), among them the distinguished editor Drenka Willen, whose list of authors included Gunter Grass, Octavio Paz and Jose Saramago.

On the same day, Simon & Schuster laid off 35 employees, and a companywide memo from Random House's CEO announced the dissolution of Doubleday (publisher of "The Da Vinci Code" and Jonathan Lethem) and Bantam Dell (Danielle Steel, John Grisham), distributing the pieces among the conglomerate's three remaining publishing groups, which ultimately resulted in lost jobs. The large Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson also announced 54 layoffs.

The bad news kept rolling in. Within weeks, Macmillan had laid off 64 employees, spreading the damage across the entire company, which includes such literary stalwarts as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Henry Holt; Picador and St. Martin's Press. Not only were some of the industry's most respected figures out of a job, but a tremendous number of writers had lost their editors and publicists.

Priya Jain. Salon - McSweeney's is holding a garage sale of sorts. An e-mail sent out last week announced that, "for the next week or so," the publishing house founded by Dave Eggers would be selling its new books at 30 percent off and its backlist at 50 percent off. It is also, by way of eBay, auctioning off donations from its more well-known contributors: One could bid on an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of "The Daily Show" guided by John Hodgman, or a "one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July."

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. "For us the timing was particularly bad," says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney's Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. "We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] 'What Is the What', which was our best seller of all time.". . .