New Mag Holds an Auction

Eric Rayman is a familiar figure around publishing, having served as counsel at Simon & Schuster for many years, then in a like capacity at the New Yorker, where he regularly arranged book deals for anthologies drawn from the magazine. He now runs a successful start-up magazine called Budget Living and last week conducted a heated auction for two books its staff has put together. They both concentrate on the magazine's mantra "spend smart, live rich" and include a room-by-room decorating guide, edited by Sarah Gray Miller and the magazine's editors, and a book called Party Central, offering economical party notions. Eight interested publishers were eventually reduced to four, and the winners were senior editor John Duff and editor Michelle Howry at Penguin.