Crown has acquired a non-fiction book by screenwriter David Jehar about the magician Harry Houdini, for an advance that Mr. Jehar said was in the “high six figures.”

Mr. Jehar, who was represented by literary agent Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit, said his book will tell the story of Houdini’s campaign to discredit Margery Crandon, who made the front page of the New York Times in the 1920s as the first spiritual medium whose abilities had been verified by science.

The book, entitled The Witch of Lime Street, will be out in early 2010, Mr. Jehar said.

Crown editor Rick Horgan, who nabbed the book in a preempt, declined to comment.

Poet and freelance magazine journalist Joanna Smith Rakoff has sold her debut novel--said to be similar in spirit and subject matter to Mary McCarthy's The Group-- to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The acquiring editor was Alexis Garagliano.

Ms. Rakoff confirmed the deal, which was brokered by literary agent Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit, in an e-mail.

A novel called Brooklyn, by poet and freelance magazine journalist Joanna Smith Rakoff, will soon have a publisher, according to literary agent Tina Bennett, who is representing the book at auction.

The novel, Ms. Rakoff's first, is said to be a contemporary take on Mary McCarthy's The Group, which follows eight Vassar girls as they set out on their adult lives.

Ms. Bennett, a top agent at Janklow & Nesbitt, declined to discuss the book in any detail, but said she expects the auction to be over by tomorrow.