Book Marks: The 'Script Thief, Awards, Regrets, Etc.

I used to do these "book marks" a lot when I was more active in monitoring goings-on in the industry that interest me, but seeing potentially multiple-figure counts of such posts tagged in the sidebar made me reconsider a few times. Then I hit a slump and stopped writing here for a while.

However, this habit helped to keep my toes in book- and publishing-related waters, so i'm getting back to it. And I have a lot to catch up on.

Let's start with the strange case of Filippo Bernardini, who stole hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, made ripples in the publishing sphere sometime back. Why would anyone want to pilfer 'scripts that would be kind of hard to monetise?

Recently, in a letter to a US federal judge, Bernardini claimed he stole the 'scripts because he wanted to read them. After failing to get hired at a literary agency where he had interned, he schemed to get people to send him manuscripts and it snowballed into a scam of sorts. But apparently his aim was not for profit:

“I wanted to keep [the manuscripts] closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops. There were times where I read the manuscripts and I felt a special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was the editor of that book.”

Kind of puts things in perspective for a certain segment of the publishing industry, doesn't it? And I speak as an editor of many books for a little over a decade. I've seen my share of 'scripts, some of it bad, and on certain days I wished I was doing something other than reading or editing them.

While some undoubtedly are calling for harsh penalties – theft of any kind in the book world is heavily frowned upon – someone at the Literary Hub thinks otherwise, because:

There are crimes and there are crimes, and this ... isn’t really a crime. Right? A lonely fantasist tricking a handful of agents into leaking manuscripts so that he can feel the illicit thrill of reading them a few months early is as close to a victimless offense as I can imagine. We didn’t send any bankers to jail after the financial collapse. No Sacklers will serve time for their part in the American opioid epidemic. Surely we can’t condemn this meek Italian bookworm to the depravity of the US prison system?

Not sure how much of this is tongue-in-cheek, but I think quite a few will get in line to vehemently disagree.

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Author Viji Krishnamoorthy's debut novel, 912 Batu Road, published by Clarity Publishing, has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. The novel is about two Malayan families' ordeal through World War II and the early 2000s when their descendants' forbidden love affair threatens to tear both families apart. Yes, the longlist was apparently announced on 30 January this year so I'm late to the party.

Speaking of awards, Tom Benn has won the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer Award for his novel, Oxblood, about an intergenerational family in a council house in the 1980s. The Jersey Evening Post adds that "Previous winners of the award – which comes with a £10,000 prize – include Normal People author Sally Rooney, Surge poet Jay Bernard and White Teeth novelist Zadie Smith."

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Writing in Book Riot, Alice Nuttall notes that...

Sometimes, authors deeply regret the books that they have published, even if – and sometimes because – those books made their names or brought them wild success. Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he tried to kill the character off permanently, only to be forced to bring him back after public outcry. Agatha Christie resented the public demand for more Poirot novels; she found her creation irritating and hated all the idiosyncrasies she had given him, something she wryly references when writing crime author Ariadne Oliver’s hatred of her own fictional detective character.

But Nuttall adds that "nearly all of the authors who went on to regret their books are white and most are men", probably because "it’s likely that there are simply not enough books being published by authors of colour for those authors to have those same feelings of regret about the work they have struggled to get out there in the first place."

What stands out for me on the list is Peter Benchley, who of course wrote Jaws. The witch hunt against sharks that the novel and the film adaptation allegedly triggered appalled Benchley, who would spend the rest of his life championing sharks and their right to live unmolested in the oceans. I found his participation in a National Geographic special on sharks, with photographer David Doubilet and notable shark attack survivor Rodney Fox, quite exceptional.

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An unlikely path to publication for a Middle Eastern author spotlights "some of the setbacks facing regional authors in getting their work read globally." Simply put: the lack of bookshops and slow adoption of e-commerce in the Middle East and North Africa means publishers struggle to just stay afloat, missing opportunities that could be had if they networked with international firms interested in their output. Can networking at international book fairs be the answer?

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More bites from the Literary Hub: despite being labelled the most wired demographic, Gen-Z still prefer print to e-books, apparently. In the same tone as the plea to spare the manuscript thief Bernardini, the writer goes on: "Citing reasons like eye-strain, digital detoxification, BookTok, and new book smell (seriously, right?), an overwhelming percentage of readers born between 1997 and 2015 prefer old fashioned paper books."

And it seems the FBI made notes about Pilsen Community Books, a Chicago-based bookstore, which is said to be "a meeting place for 'anarchist violent extremists, or ‘AVEs,’ environmental violent extremists, or ‘EVEs’ and pro-abortion extremists.” Bookstores through the ages have cultivated certain reputations based on what they sell, who they platform, and who runs them but wow. And this news surfacing around this period in American history...