Rea Hederman, who also owns the New York Review of Books, has talked with potential buyers for Granta magazine and Granta Books in recent months as he contemplates retirement, one of the publisher's senior officials said on Friday.

"We hope he'll find someone sympathetic with what we do," said Gail Lynch, publisher of Granta Books.

"What would be ideal would be someone like Rea, who's benevolent, philanthropic and wealthy and who wants to be associated with a brand like Granta and let it carry on the way it is at the moment," she added.

Granta has become well known among literati for its best-of lists that single out up-and-coming writers in Britain and the United States.

Hederman, who first invested in Granta in 1986 and then bought it in 1995, could not immediately be reached at his New York office. Trade journal Publishing News said he has spoken to larger publishers including Bloomsbury and Macmillan.

"He's not desperate to sell," Lynch said. "If he doesn't get the buyer he wants, he'll carry on with it for the time being."

Granta, now published in London and New York, was founded by Cambridge students to create a journal filled with political discourse and literary criticism.

It went on to publish the early work of such writers as Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne, playwright and novelist Michael Frayn and poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Later contributors have included such literary heavyweights as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford and Paul Theroux.

"During the 1970s, it ran into trouble -- dwindling money, mounting apathy -- from which it was rescued by a small group of postgraduates who successfully and surprisingly relaunched it as a magazine of new writing, with both writers and their audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge," editor Ian Jack wrote on the Granta Web site.

Last year, Granta swung to a profit of 168,000 pounds ($303,100) on about 3 million pounds of sales from a 129,000 pound loss in 2003 and 2.3 million pounds of sales.

In addition to its thematic, numbered magazine issues, the latest of which is "Granta 90: Country Life," Granta has recently published Anna Funder's acclaimed "Stasiland" and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel & Dimed."