I write these lines about literary rights on the “day of the book” and “the rose” in Catalonia.
When I have some money I buy books, if I have some left over I buy clothes and food.
Erasmus of Rotterdam
A book day a bit strange since there are no books or roses, that is, there are books but not in the street, not as a party although many have done it at home or in their neighbor’s yard, not as a long walk between bookstalls, with the streets crowded with people, with a clear spring day that invites you to take off your jacket in the sun and put it back on in the shade, letting time run without haste or taking a moment at lunch to do something different, Taking a look at the new titles, browsing through them, rediscovering a classic, doubting whether we would have read that one with the attractive cover some time ago, recognizing a writer, browsing through the books with our eyes or letting ourselves be seduced by their drawings or by their first sentences and taking the opportunity to buy that book we have seen so many times but which we could not make up our minds about, lacking an excuse to buy it. Only reading it will tell us if we were right or wrong. No matter what makes the day of the book a special day is that it is a moment to enjoy not so much the reading as the book.
Santiago Posteguillo relates in one of his books a well-known anecdote about Tolkien and copyrights in the United States. The American edition of “The Lord of the Rings” had achieved a huge success and another publisher massively launched a softcover edition of the work. So far so good, but they did not want to pay royalties to the writer. They claimed that when they published the book, the United States had not yet signed the Berne Convention, something they would do a few months later, an international treaty that regulates copyright worldwide. Taking advantage of this legal, if not moral, loophole, the publisher refused to pay any money to the author. Tolkien, outraged, took his revenge. He replied to each of the admirers who had written to congratulate him on his book, explaining what was happening. It took him a long time. Today with social networks the scandal would have arisen immediately and everywhere but the effect was the same, a scandal was mounted that today we would call viral and before the enormous popular discredit that was beginning to suffer the publisher decided to rectify and agree with the author the amounts to be received for his work.
For his part, Roberto Calasso says that when he wanted to publish the “non-Maigret” books in his collection, he encountered enormous contractual problems. The works had already been published in Italy, but little by little they had all gone out of circulation and were only found in cheap paperback editions, many Maigret sold at newsstands. It took almost two years and the decisive intervention of the author himself to solve the contractual obstacles. It was worth the wait because, thanks to the publisher’s tenacity, Simenon began to be considered in Italy as a “serious” writer who would eventually be published in the “La Pleiade” collection, the gateway to the history of French literature.
Hubert Nyssen, the publisher of Actes Sud, discusses the two failed publishing projects, with all the legal consequences they entailed, before launching his more lasting project. The lessons learned served him well to persist in the publishing world and to place himself in a more appropriate legal framework than in the first cases. All of which does not detract from the fact that, as the publisher says, “I became a publisher by accident“. He also tells how, by betting on Nina Berberova and publishing her books when nobody remembered her anymore, he was appointed administrator of all her work all over the world, which was translated into more than twenty languages. It meant the internalization of the publisher and moving “from the small to the big industry”.
Jean Giono, for his part, focused his preface to his translation of Moby Dick as Melville would have done in London in order to whip up his English publishers and collect his royalties. Whether Giono’s account is true or not, for much of the preface is more like an autobiography than a biographical essay, royalties were a constant concern for an author who took a long time to be recognized.
In 1998 Générale des Eaux became Vivendi with the intention of becoming a large entertainment and communications company and from there began to acquire all kinds of publishing companies in the United States that turned out to be totally disastrous investments. Its CEO wanted to be big at all costs and that cost him multi-million dollar losses that are well known. Contracts, sales and purchases, divestments, distribution and many other legal vicissitudes, channel one of the worst stories of the rise and fall of the book industry.
In New York, according to André Schiffrin, small neighborhood bookstores were disappearing in the face of legal pressure from the Barnes & Noble chain. Those that could not be finished would be taken care of by the owners of the stores, who would raise their prices disproportionately, without the American legislation establishing any limitation, until they were forced to close.
Dostoevsky had to write one of his best novels in less than a month because otherwise he would have lost the rights to his other novels, Balzac constantly fled from his creditors and wrote at night to meet his publishing commitments, Dickens was one of the greatest defenders of copyright and the abuse that American publishers made of his works, in the Spain of the Golden Age there were no copyrights, but “privileges” that meant a kind of exclusivity of publishing in a particular territory and for a certain period of time. The examples could be multiplied.
All these little anecdotes serve to demonstrate how the law is fully present in the publishing world, from the very moment of creation with copyrights and advances (for the lucky ones) for the next books, commissions and contracts with the “blacks” (which still exist) or literary prizes, the drafting of their rules, the taxation of awards and all the promotion that entails. The law is also present in the moments prior to publication with agency contracts, self-publishing agreements, contracts with publishers, corrections, translations, legal deposit and reprints. At the moment of sale, the law is also in a privileged place, distribution, the deposit of the book in bookstores, the fixed price in some countries and the sale at low cost in others, discounts, points of sale beyond the bookstores such as in department stores or newsstands, orders, retail, returns, promotions, reviews, mail order or digital editions, film adaptations, theme parks, merchandising, …. A whole world of agreements and disagreements, rights and obligations, consensuses and possible conflicts, encounters and disagreements, exclusivities and negotiations that, in a way, reproduce the same dynamics as in most sectors. The aura of romanticism and the creative energy that accompanies the book and the author’s legend does not exclude that, as in any human relationship, a network of rights and obligations is established that must be dealt with from a legal perspective. Law in these cases can never be the protagonist, but a very useful (and necessary) traveling companion. What happens in the book industry can be replicated in all areas of business activity. There is no economy without activity and there is no activity without law.
But today is Book Day and when every April 23 we celebrate books and their creators, we must not forget that we are, indirectly, paying tribute to law in its broadest concept, for without law there would surely be no books and without books we would have nothing to celebrate.
