By day, Jennifer Gilmore is Harcourt's director of publicity. But she's also a writer whose first novel, GOLDEN COUNTRY, was published earlier this fall by Scribner and garnered critical acclaim in various places. But the wall that separates her two states has broken down, as the paperback rights to her debut have gone to - Harcourt! Specifically, the company's paperback publisher, Tina Pohlman, who plans to release the book in Fall 2007.

No doubt there is precedent for this merging of states, but I can't recall any recent examples. (The only one that came to Ron's mind was Random House editor-at-large David Ebershoff, who published his first two books with Viking but sold his third, Pasadena, to Random.) And someone else can make the requisite blindness jokes...