Dislodging F.S.G.(The Talk of the Town)(Farrar, Straus & Giroux's new office )

Joy Isenberg, who has worked at Farrar, Straus & Giroux for thirty-eight years, says that one of the things she is most looking forward to when the company moves this week out of its storied offices, at 19 Union Square West, is the prospect of hot running water in the ladies' room. "You had to put your own hot-water tank in, and that was not something that was in the F.S.G. budget," Isenberg, who is a senior vice-president and director of operations at the company, explained the other day. "The money went into the books, not into painting the walls." Elaine Kramer, the company's longest-serving employee, who was hired in the accounts department in 1952, said that, while the employees were happy about the prospect of improved amenities--there will be a pantry, so for the first time coffee will be made in-house, rather than brought in--many of the writers, over the years, had been attached to the house's primitive living conditions. "Isaac Singer--he liked it that way," Kramer said.

Since November, Isenberg and Kramer, along with more than half of the rest of the staff, have been camping out at the Flatiron Building, in anticipation of the move to new headquarters, on West Eighteenth Street. Late last year, the contents of two of the company's three notoriously cramped and cluttered floors--a casual visitor could be forgiven for assuming that the company, like that of John Harmon in "Our Mutual Friend," was in the dust business, rather than the book one--were sorted and packed up. Among the documentary treasures found were memos, dating from the nineteen-fifties, that gave instructions on procedure in the event of nuclear attack--an event against which even the works of the house's first best-selling author, Gayelord Hauser, who wrote "Look Younger, Live Longer," would offer no protection. There were memos, too, that warned of the repercussions if anyone was found mishandling the mimeograph machine. "It said that, if the machine broke, nine dollars and thirty-seven cents would be deducted from the paycheck of whoever was responsible," ...