For someone who, when he severed ties with Orion, seemed perfectly content to stay out of the publishing business for a little while, Anthony Cheetham has been a busy little boy. And now he's gone and started his own imprint, Quercus Books, which will be distributed by Random House and repped by Faber.

According to the news release, Quercus will launch in March, planning 30 titles during its first year. Its fiction list will include a crime imprint, Quercus Crime, which will be spearheaded by Otto Penzler, who is perhaps even busier than Cheetham, what with selling books (at a new location, even) running his own imprint at Harcourt, editing anthologies, and what have you.

But two things strike me as particularly amusing: first, we've been down this exact same road before -- a little over a year ago, in fact, when it was announced that Cheetham would be partnering with Penzler to start up a crime imprint at Hutchinson (a division of Random House UK.) Obviously, that's no longer the case, but what prompted the split?

And the other thing was that when Quercus was originally announced, Cheetham would be partnering with Profile books and other publishers with the aim of putting projects together with them. Looks like Cheetham prefers to fly solo...