It is a true story - that is the point - but from no side, I fear, is it a pretty or agreeable one. However, it may interest people in the world of books and academe, be they authors, publishers, educators or lawyers, and will perhaps also provide material for moralists, psychologists, and even philosophers, I don't know. My only certainty is that now feels the time to set it down, a task for which I have long had no stomach, and to let those who will, read. A full blow-by-blow account, including all of the legal and psychological detail, would soon become a tedious slog through the myriad back streets that comprise the vast city of English Law, and through the yet dingier warren of pathways beneath in which run the human emotions that drive it, so I will here attempt little more than a sketch-map of both domains, whose further intricacies I must leave to the reader's imagination.
Most people in publishing have probably by now heard of Malcolm v. Oxford, my marathon lawsuit over the University Press's breach of contract to publish a philosophy text I offered them entitled Making Names, but few seem to know the extraordinary facts of the story or properly to understand the legal and other implications of the case, which is certainly the most important in its field since the 1920s, and arguably ever. Despite meriting respectively three and six references in the standard contract-law textbooks Chitty and Treitel (Sweet & Maxwell, 1994 & 1995) there has been an almost complete silence on the affair in the newspapers, meagre coverage of it in the law journals (one article in the Entertainment Law Review), no law report, not a single line of analysis in The Author magazine, and only a strange mis-statement of it in Charles Clark'sPublishing Agreements (Butterworth, 1993), formerly an authority on the subject. Eeriest of all, it is even omitted fromThe Times Index. This general oversight has recently been partially rectified by the appearance of Hugh Jones' invaluable Publishing Law (Routledge, 1996), in which he devotes a section to the extraction of some of the case's key points. Necessarily though, his treatment glosses certain aspects which his readers may wish to have explained, and begs many questions, not the least of which is: why on earth did I spend over six years and Oxford an estimated half a million pounds fighting over such an apparently simple matter? Since, for reasons that will soon become obvious, no established publisher will want to have this account broadcast, I am thinking of calling it Pariah, and letting it loose, like a message in a bottle, upon the high seas of the Internet [see note below]. Already this presents a fine publishing paradox - the first of several - to which this new, uncorporatised electronic medium may offer a fine solution. My presentation will be broadly chronological, although from time to time I will digress when there arises a topic that merits some examination.
Life Before Oxford
Hugh Jones' book begins, very properly, with a chapter entitled Authors and Ideas, whose first section is in turn headed Original Ideas. As Plato himself might have insisted, in the beginning is the Idea. A brief glance around a popular bookshop may make one wonder just how many modern books do in fact begin with authors' ideas, let alone original ones, but be that as it may, in a very literal sense mine, I believe, did. At school I studied science (maths, physics and chemistry to 'S' and university scholarship levels), before switching at Cambridge to 'moral sciences', as philosophy was then known there. Already, at school, I had become dissatisfied with certain of the assumptions and dogmas of science and had found greater insight in the writings of the philosophers, to whom I had been introduced in a sixth-form option. After school, I spent two years travelling and working in Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, India, the Far East and the U.S.S.R. before taking up my university place, where, in between editing a scurrilous magazine and getting into the usual kinds of trouble, I studied under the tutelage of such authorities as Renford Bambrough, Bernard Williams, Casimir Lewy and Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein's executrix-translator. On gaining a degree and moving to Brighton, I was invited to give introductory philosophy courses at several adult education centres around Sussex, and after a few years of this work developed one or two novel twists of argument or presentation which began to cohere, it seemed to me, into an interesting and unexpected new pattern. Eventually I stumbled upon what I believed, and still sometimes believe, to be an unusually fruitful condensation of their nub. In short, I had an idea...
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