Now that Rupert Murdoch has pulled the plug on the O.J. Simpson book/TV package (see Wilda Williams’s “The Juice Is Cooked” and “Sleazy Does It!”), it may seem pointless to dedicate any more space to the topic. But I can’t help but luxuriate in its anticlimactic end: Judith Regan, Simpson’s publisher at Regan Books, orchestrated and fanned a damnable furor only to have it stamped out by her Big Boss. This was, in fact, more shocking and titillating to me than the spin of the Simpson book and boob tube special. Why, you may ask?

Regan, as many publishing people know, has been manufacturing celebrity dreck for years without reprimand. Take last year’s autobiographical novel by celebutante Nicole Ritchie, The Truth About Diamonds, which mananged to make me livid on a Friday afternoon. This book is not fiction as it’s labeled—it’s straight-up, juice-drenched memoir, packaged with airbrushed glamour shots of Richie; in other words, another way to push celebrity gossip, not further contemporary fiction.

Of course, the Simpson project took Regan’s M.O. to a whole other level. But I never thought for a second that it would be too much for the American public to handle given how long we’ve been worshipping at the altar of the often sick and narcissistic rich and famous (remember Madonna’s Sex became a best seller in 1992 despite being slammed as pornography). That we did protest loudly enough in the Simpson case gives me hope for the future of standards in publishing, though I wouldn’t drop my guard when it comes to Regan.