The lyrics to the Beatles song Paperback Writer take the form of a letter sent by an aspiring, well, paperback writer to a publishing house, offering his latest work for publication. The book took him years to write and is based on a novel by a man named Lear.
Was that ever a common business model in publishing - that existing novels, previously released as hard covers, would be adapted by a different author into paperback format, but without the whole affair being considered plagiarism? In my experience, novels are usually released first as hard covers; subsequently they are also released as paperbacks, but the texts of the hard cover and paperback versions are identical, and they are published under the same author name - there is no separate process of adapting a novel into a paperback version, let alone for publication under the name of another writer. Was that would British publishers would do in the 1960s?
It’s not unusual for novels to be based on previous novels. Mary Reilly, for instance, was based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In paperback, Barbara Hambly’s Ismael is a Star Trek novel based on the TV series Here Comes the Brides. Hambly wrote it believing that Brides was owned by Paramount, so there wouldn’t be any permissions issue. Unfortunately, she was wrong – Screen Gems owned it – but they did grant permission without any problems.
Another point is that if Lear’s novel was public domain, then the Paperback Writer could use it without any permission issues.
However, that’s not what the aspiring author has done in this case. He’s written a paperback that’s a thousand pages long, and intends to make it even longer. It’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t have a clue. Plagiarism is only one of the problems with his work.
Note, though, that it is possible to have a work that is an adaptation of a previous work, provided that you change the setting enough. An example of this is Yojimbo, being adapted into A Fistful of Dollars, and then again into Last Man Standing. Even then Sergio Leone had to settle a lawsuit. I can’t think offhand of any novels that did this, but there must be some. (edit - such as Mary Reilly)
“Paperback Writer” came out in 1966. In 1964 and 1965, two “nonsensical” books by John Lennon had been published, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.
This may be a reference to Edward Lear, best known for his “literary nonsense in poetry and prose”. Lennon’s books had sold well and drawn parallel’s to Lear’s work.
Abridging novels for subsequent publication was common in publishing before and after and during *Reader’s Digest’s *heyday. But it was always done only after the original author and original publisher signed a contract authorizing the abridgement and getting money for it.
And as WAM says, everything I’ve ever read about the song makes it clear that Edmund Lear was the inspiration. Writing a book based on Lear would be perfectly legal, just as writing a book based on Mark Twain would be.
Watch out, the Twain Foundation keeps renewing his works and his image and is actively on the lookout for anyone infringing on any Ol’ Sam Clemens stuff (and I have the Cease ‘n’ Desist letter to prove it).
The fallacy I see: expecting a song’s lyric to make sense. Goo-goo g’joob, pilgrim! Sure, there’s that dig at the Daily Mail, but why don’t we do it in the road?
Generally speaking, you can’t copyright an idea, only a particular expression of an idea. Anyone can write a novel about an orphan who goes to a boarding school that teaches magic, and you won’t get sued by J.K. Rowling.
It’s also not uncommon for someone to write a book as a “reply” to a more famous book. John Steakley’s sci-fi novel Armor was in part a rebuttal to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, recasting the “future soldiers in power armor fighting space bugs” theme into something more in tune with the post-Vietnam era. Steakley’s novel is based on Heinlein’s, but is not in any way plagiarized by him.
As to the Beatles song, I’d always assumed the “man called Lear” was a reference to Norman Lear. I pictured this cocky asshole writing to a publisher and being all, “I’m really into this writer, Norman Lear? You probably haven’t heard of him,” and the publisher’s got a signed photo of Lear on his desk.
Not a single one of the tv series Lear is now famous for had begun when “Paperback Writer” was written in 1966. He was then a very minor writer of a few individual tv shows and one movie, probably best know for creating The Deputy, a western series without a lot of laughs. Outside of Hollywood, probably not one person in a thousand in America could identify him, and far fewer in Britain.
OTOH, the Beatles were enormous fans of Edward Lear, who had godlike status and name recognition in their country. The odds favor him by about a billion to one.
The only thing that made me think that it might not be Edward Lear is the phrase “a man named…” Edward Lear was so famous that the suggestion that anyone working at any level of publishing in the 1960s hadn’t heard of him is inconceivable. Even if people don’t know him now they are still aware of the influence of his work in, for example, the popularisation of limericks, and The Owl and the Pussycat.
But the suggestion up thread that this aspiring writer is delusional makes sense of this; to not know how well known Edward Lear is shows that the person does not have a good grasp of things.
I teach a reading course to English language learners in Korea in which all the books are truncated, abridged, and simplified versions of famous novels. I really think Classics Illustrated or Classic Comics would work better, but my boss won’t go for it.
