Tina Pohlman was one of the editors who lost her position in Doubleday‘s pre-re-organization layoffs last fall, but she’s bounced back—teaming up with a friend who develops games for mobile phones to launch Moulinarn Mobile Books. The company’s first release is an iPhone/iPod Touch reissue of Great First Lines, “an irresistible collection of literature’s great opening sentences, cleverly arranged so that each line builds upon the one before it to create a unique story” which was originally published in 1992 by Celina Spiegel and Peter Kupfer. (Spiegel, more commonly known as “Cindy,” was Pohlman’s boss at Spiegel & Grau.)
“It’s an ideal collaboration for a game developer and a book editor,” Pohlman emailed us, “as it works as both a game and a book.” She also said that five more titles are already in the pipeline, including John Sutherland‘s Curiosities of Literature and short story collections by Rudyard Kipling and Anton Chekhov. And Moulinarn plans to expand to other mobile platforms: “We are particularly interested in Nokia’s Ovi application store right now.” In the meantime, you can buy Great First Lines from the iTunes store.