After this morning’s blind item about one of New York’s largest publishers scheduling a weekend-long session with the exterminators, leading employees to suspect a bed bug infestation, Hamilton Nolan of Gawker began working his own publishing industry contacts, and (matching our intel) came up with Penguin Group shortly after 12 p.m. Running with that knowledge, NY Observer publishing reporter Leon Neyfakh did a consultation with two bug experts, looking for hints about how Penguin—which declined to discuss the matter—would be handling their “insect issue.”
Neyfakh also asks a key question for literati who don’t work at Penguin but have contact with its staffers, especially the publicists: Could the bed bugs get out of the building through review copies? “Not really,” according to one of his experts, “but maybe.” (To which we would add: It also depends on exactly where in the building those infestations were found.) We’ll just repeat our advice to staffers from this morning: Run your backpack through the laundry this weekend, especially if you put it on the floor at work.