MALCOLM GLADWELL BLINKS AT ABBIE CONANT

If Malcolm Gladwell had written about you in his latest best seller, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," you'd probably know it in a New York minute. If you were Abbie Conant, who is the subject of the book's final chapter, you wouldn't.

When pressed, Conant recalls speaking with Gladwell (right) by phone. But she lives in Germany and had only a vague idea of who he was. She didn't subscribe to The New Yorker, where he's a staff writer, and hadn't read "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," his previous best seller.

It took an old friend she knew from Colorado, now a research librarian at Fortune magazine in New York, to break the news to her long after "Blink" had soared to No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list. (It's been on the list for 11 weeks, No. 1 for most of them.)

"I hadn't read anything more than a few blurbs about the book," says Susan Kaufman, recalling Gladwell's appearance a while ago at a meeting of the Special Libraries Association. "He was a big draw. The place was packed. It was not the usual." Gladwell told the librarians he wasn't going to read from his book. "He said, "I think it's better if I tell you a story,'" Kaufman remembers. "And then he proceeded to say there was this musician in Germany, and he said her name. It was such an odd thing. Abbie hadn't ever mentioned that he had spoken to her for the book. He went on and on."

Kaufman (a violist) and Conant (a trombonist) met in the late '70s when they'd played together in the Colorado Philharmonic, a training orchestra. Though they went their separate ways afterward -- Kaufman, who had graduated from Barnard, entered Columbia's library school and took up a research career; Conant graduated from the University of New Mexico and Juilliard into an orchestra career in Turin and Munich and is now a trombone professor -- they'd always kept in touch.