Bookend
We still await the outcome of the anti-trust suit brought fifteen months ago by the US Justice Department against the twenty-one unsuspecting New York publishers accused of conspiring with British firms to carve up world markets. Bookbuyer has already commented on this political interference with British commercial practice (December, 1974), on the man who helped start it (May, 1975) and on the hypocrisy of an American government which preaches freer trade within the British Commonwealth whilst maintaining the most discriminatory sanctions against foreign books entering the US. 1 refer in particular to the manufacturing clause of the American Copyright Act.
This curious clause stipulates that if an American author's book is printed outside the US, he forfeits copyright protection when more than 1500 copies are imported into America — a device designed to protect American printers, presumably at the expense of American authors and irritating foreign publishers. This pernicious piece of protectionism is usually dismissed as a sick joke in civilised circles but I have only just discovered a case in which it has proved remarkably effective in damaging the British interest — and with the hapless assistance of a public British authority.
When the BBC was preparing its book of the successful America series, it looked as though it would be cheapest to print it in Britain and to print the British and American editions together. Then someone remembered that the author — Blackpool-born Alistair Cooke — had become a naturalised American citizen somewhere along the way. If the American publishers Alfred Knopf imported more than 1500 copies of America, .Mr. Cooke would forfeit copyright protection in the US. So what happened? The book was set up in type in Britain, but printed in America; Knopf have sold over a million copies there; the BBC has already imported another 250,000 copies back; and the British printing industry has lost the chance of printing 1,250,000 copies of a E6 book which, on purely commercial grounds, it was better placed to undertake.
Cross man
I fear that Alan Watkins, now a columnist with the Observer, is peeved with his publishers Cape. Mr Watkins is writing a book on Politicians and the Press and insists that he cannot do the job properly without taking a peep at the manuscript for Vol 2 of the Crossman Diaries (published by Cape and Hamish Hamilton). Cape, careful fellows, are refusing to let him near the work.
Bookbuyer
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