Abstract
This is a cautionary tale about an internet hijack. It should be a warning to all authors that this could happen to them. In many ways, I hope it does. In the late 1960s, an old friend Robert Forrest-Webb and I wrote a humorous novel about the cold war. It had a 19-word title that one literary critic subsequently described as “the book with the title you will never forget – if you can remember it”. The title was And to my Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan In a Poker Game, and we presented it to the prestigious publisher, Hodder & Stoughton.
We were a little surprised, but delighted, that it jumped at the chance. But there was a condition. “We can't use a title as long as that and still get an author with five names on the same cover,” the publisher warned. I looked daggers at my co-author with his double-barrelled name. The publisher smiled at us. “But I've got a solution: We'll rename you both David Forrest.” The book was published and surprisingly well received. Here in the UK it became the Book of the Month Club choice. Le Monde, then regarded as the intellectual newspaper of Europe, serialised it for a month. So did magazines in Canada and Australia. And two different divisions of Walt Disney (film and television) took options on it for a period lasting some eight years.
The second David Forrest novel, The Great Dinosaur Robbery, was bought within 11 days of publication by Walt Disney Pictures, and turned into the film One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, starring Peter Ustinov.
But it was our third novel that rang the loudest bell. After Me, the Deluge won first prize as the most humorous book of the year at the 1973 International Humorous Literature Festival held in Bordighera, Italy. The following year, Italy's leading two impresarios, Garinei & Giovannini, turned it into a lavish stage musical in Rome, where it has now established itself as Italy's favourite musical. It has been translated into 10 languages and has been seen by more than 15 million people. On December 2, 2014, it celebrated running there for 40 years. Its title in Italy is Aggiungi un Posto a Tavola (Add another place at the table).
The show has also played in Madrid (12 years) and in every Latin American country from Argentina (13 years in Buenos Aires) to Mexico City (eight years) under the title El Diluvio Que Viene (The Deluge that is Coming). It was also staged in London, at the Adelphi Theatre, in 1978–79, under the name Beyond the Rainbow, and in Vienna, Moscow and in Germany, Poland and Hungary.
The book tells the story of a young Catholic priest who gets called to the village bar at 2am one night to take an important telephone call. At the other end of the line is God, who tells the incredulous priest that he is planning to destroy all the people on earth by means of another catastrophic flood, and that only the priest and his village flock will be saved. But first they must build an ark, like Noah's, and equip it with samples of the earth's birds and animals. But the Almighty, in his grand design, just hadn't taken into account one thing: the self-interested and stubborn intervention of the Vatican.
In August 2013, my co-author, who has published ebooks under his own name, suggested we privately publish our David Forrest books as ebooks. He remarked that probably ebook publishers hadn't shown any interest in our work, possibly because our humour in these books might be regarded as out-of-date. I was more than slightly downhearted by this possibility. So that night I checked out the first of our books online. To my astonishment I found glowing review after glowing review of this book by a discussion group that had Italian names in it. I was baffled. So I checked the dates of these reviews. They had been published in April, May, June and July of 2013. I was stunned.
Why should so many people be reviewing a book last published in 1977 – 36 years previously?
So I dug deeper. Finally I found the answer: the book had been pirated as an ebook for the past 18 months by an Italian publisher and the reviews I had just read were based on the internet version it had published. Since this copy of the book had been marketed by both the Italian publisher and Amazon, I called and wrote to Amazon that its version was being illegally published – and demanded it should be taken off the market, which it duly did, but not before I was able to buy a copy of the book as a souvenir.
I briefed a lawyer in Rome and contacted the Italian publisher. The publisher was apologetic and he emailed me correspondence he had sent to other publishers in attempts to acquire the rights. He also sent me one or two of the replies, one of which said I had changed address and not been in contact with the company for more than 30 years. Which was true.
Suddenly, the ebook act of piracy turned to our advantage. I had contacted our original London publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, and sent it copies of the Italian internet reviews of the hijacked Albert book. It immediately bought the world rights for the four books we had written, and has published three of them so far this year.
In the meantime, the “hijacking” company had been incorporated into the Hodder & Stoughton deal and has now also legitimately reacquired the Italian rights for the third book, the one that was turned into the stage musical. So, at the moment, both the musical and the ebook version of the original book that inspired it are before the Italian public.