I spent a few days in London recently, and came back with this story: author Andrew Malcolm is taking Oxford University Press to court to compel the Press to publish his book; he is also suing for £180,000 in costs plus damages. Malcolm is a lecturer in philosophy, who spent 10 years writing "a modern Platonic dialogue" of some 220,000 words. [The Greek philosopher himself is probably turning in his cave at the length of the manuscript; Plato's own dialogues were mercifully short, possibly because there are only so many ways to say, "Gee, Socrates, you are so right; how do you think of all that smart stuff?"]
Anyway, according to Malcolm, who has letters and tape-recorded phone conversations to place in evidence at the hearing, he and an OUP editor, Henry Hardy, had an agreement - that Malcolm would spend six months correcting the manuscript in exchange for OUP's undertaking to publish the work. But Hardy's then-superior, Richard Charkin, who has since left OUP and is now head of Octopus, was not enthusiastic over the Dialogue and declined to publish it. The Board of Delegates, which oversee OUP in lieu of the more conventional pub board, say there was no binding contract. Now the matter is going to court, and there is already a ruling that precludes an Oxford-educated judge from hearing it.
Go to the next item in the Malcolm v Oxford saga.