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Like any industry “buzz,” the talk surrounding The Golden Compass started out as a whisper. In this case the murmurs started when Levine, Pullman’s editor, sent the manuscript out for author quotes and received raves from Newbery Medalists Lloyd Alexander and Lois Lowry, as well as fantasy writer Terry Brooks. As Levine recalls, this was the moment when “people in-house really started to sit up and take note;’ And thanks to the company’s recent adoption of Lotus Notes technology (see Bookselling, Feb. 19), Levine was able to instantaneously post these tidbits to the entire company, thus spreading the good word even faster.

Terry Brooks’s recommendation of the book to his editor Veronica Chapman at Del Rey (Ballantine’s fantasy imprint) was, in Levine’s words, “an arrow into a completely different part of Random House.” Del Rey acquired the paperback rights to the entire trilogy, and the notion began to take shape that The Golden Compass might