Well Said

Posted 25 July, 2007 in Uncategorized |

Did you hear about the stunt that David Lassman, who runs the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, pulled recently? Lassman submitted thinly veiled chapters from Auten’s books, under a pseudonym, to eighteen publishers in the U.K., all of whom rejected them. This was occasion for Lassman to crow about how dense the publishers were not to have recognized the masterpieces in question.

This is not the first time someone has tried this (I seem to remember eye weekly here in Toronto doing something similar some years back, using Hemingway and Joyce instead of Austen, and appending the names of Toronto Maple Leafs hockey players as authors), and it never fails to set my teeth on edge.

I’ve worked in the editorial department at a Canadian publishing house, and I can say with some certainty that if Ulysses or The Mill on the Floss came across my desk, I’d likely have rejected them and not lost any sleep over it. Andrew Franklin, publisher of Profile Books in the U.K. eloquently points out why in an article in the Independent:

Publishers turn down masterpieces every day and miss the opportunity to publish great bestsellers. Last year I missed Freakonomics. And there are other great books that I am too embarrassed to name. But if I spent my life fretting about the ones that got away I would never attend to the fish in the net. And we can console ourselves with another thought: if we didn’t see the potential when it was submitted to us we couldn’t have published it successfully either. The sort of person who lies awake worrying about the books that they are not publishing is not cut out for the job and should confine themselves to running a cosy literary society.

Moreover, Franklin goes on to attest that while Austen’s work may have endured, it’s not really the kind of thing that early 21st century publishers are going to be looking for when they read manuscripts.

Regardless, unsuspecting publishers, acting in goodwill, are not going to presume that any given manuscript that comes across their desk — and they get dozens every week — will contain material that has been plagiarized from a canonical work. (When an author signs a contract with a publisher, (s)he warrants, among other things, that the work to be published is original.)

Failing to recognize Austen’s words out of context is not an indication that a publisher is an unread dunderhead who has no business being in the job, and suggesting otherwise evinces a kind of smug superciliousness that doesn’t do any kind of service to the enterprise of publishing — or of literature, for that matter.

Your comment: