The War for Jericho, 2/4/99 (original) (raw)
The War for (Don't go to) Jericho
Commentary article by Andrew Malcolm in the Times Literary Supplement, 2nd April 1999. This is an unabridged version, with links and notes. Passages that were edited from the published version are in square brackets. Postscripts follow.
click for full-size scan of original article
The last of Oxford's poets have departed, limping and bruised, to Manchester. Does business now return to normal, will the siege of Jericho now be lifted, as its evidently worried elders hope? Surely the poets' humiliating exile and Sir Keith Thomas's revealing The purpose and the cost (TLS, February 5), far from ending a minor battle, rather mark the beginning of a new and wider war, the war James Fenton identified as between the Israelites and Philistines [1]. For after the months of relentless trumpeting, surely too many deep cracks have opened in Jericho's ancient ramparts, too much no longer looks structurally sound, too many of the city's own tribe are in revolt. So, as a lone sapper who once penetrated those implacable walls and glimpsed the horrid realities within, I bring all present partisans intelligence.
Readers may remember that it was my six-year breach-of-contract action against Oxford that in 1990 redrew author-publisher law across the whole industry, as demonstrated recently by Myers v Macmillan. The current case of the Oxford poets raises the selfsame set of troublesome questions: Who and what is the OUP? Who is in ultimate authority over it? To whom is it accountable? I repeatedly found, before, during and after my lawsuit, that the lack of clear answers to these questions, the systematic haziness of the Press's status and constitution, were the fundamental causes of most of my (and their) problems. So again today: on the one hand we find Sir Keith referring to the University as "the owner" of OUP, as though he were only carrying out that owner's orders (in fact in most Oxford literature the Press is described, rather differently, as "a department" of the University). On the other hand we witness the entertaining spectacle of a cavalcade of Oxford dons, notably from the English Faculty, queuing up to castigate their own imprint, publicly dissociate themselves from its decisions, and even doubt its right to charitable status, as though they had nothing whatever to do with it [1].
This emotive phrase "charitable status," it should at once be remarked, is deafeningly absent from Sir Keith's long soul-search, and this raises a point that can quickly be clarified: it is not the OUP, specifically, which enjoys this precious privilege, but Oxford University itself, of which the Press is, let's agree, a department [I subsequently learnt that this is incorrect - see note* below - AM]. All British universities, and therefore their presses, are automatically "exempt" charities too, so ordained by the Queen in Council. This means not only that, unlike their commercial rivals, they do not have to pay corporation tax, rates and so forth, but also that, unlike ordinary registered charities, they are not obliged to provide the Commissioners, and thereby the public, with a mission statement against which their marketplace operations (such as poetry-axings) can be measured or challenged [2]. In this respect OUP thus seems perfectly unassailable, although Alan Howarth, for the Government, has made dark references to "the public interest" [and Charles Martindale interestingly suggests (TLS, February 12) a HarperCollins-prompted investigation by the Office of Fair Trading].
My legal action further clarifies the point about identity: although all of my dealings had been with the OUP's staff in Walton Street, when I sued, I sued the University, not OUP. Thus my case's full title reads Malcolm versus The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford, and since, as Thomas says, the Press is wholly owned by the University, a bracketed addition trading as Oxford University Press was struck by the court from my writ on day one of the proceedings, never to reappear. This is no mere pedantry, for by the extraordinary terms of the action's final settlement, it is the members of the University who are thus in perpetuity (and perhaps ignorance) bound, in a way I believe to be unique in publishing history [3]. Ownership begets liability.
So how does the University exercise control over its errant possession? OUP is said to be answerable to its committee of Delegates, a group of roughly twenty senior dons. Each year two or three of these change, while the Vice-Chancellor, Assessor and two Proctors are Delegates ex officio. Behind this there stands another, nominating committee of thirteen, whose composition changes almost completely from year to year, again with the ex officios. Already this system sounds like a near-perfect guarantee of discontinuity, muddle and publishing inexpertise, and so it turns out to be.
Thinking back over my own Oxford history, I remember that even at street level, as it were, at the level of author seeking book definition and deal, I was quickly apprised of the consequent problem: my year-long negotiation with an enthusiastic editor was haunted throughout by the capricious bogey of "Delegate approval", a circumstance which his head of department later confided "drove him up the wall". In the event, when my book then fell victim of an ugly power struggle within the management, the Delegate who had "started the ball rolling, got it over their approval hurdle and galloped ahead with it", to contract and beyond, ran a mile - in fact several thousand miles, to Princeton, USA, from where he could not be subpoenaed [4]. Several years and umpteen thousand pounds of litigation later, he wrote to me - our first ever communication - saying "My own sense is that we were at cross-purposes from the start..." Suddenly I realised the whole problem: all along, my spectral Delegate had privately imagined himself corresponding with me, had silently played at being my publisher, when in fact he had no career or financial stake whatever in my book or in the book business generally, but was off instead enjoying the subsidised glades of Academe. His whims were, in all senses, perfectly academic. Thus it was no surprise when five years after writing excitedly of a potential bestseller, from the safety of America he totally rubbished every aspect of it. So again with Sir Keith and his uneasy conscience: he writes only as though he were the head of a commercial, multinational conglomerate: in fact, he is a media-mogul amateur.
The endless scope for evasion and bungling ensured by OUP's hazy, amateur constitution also, I believe, explains why our litigation became so lunatic; why, for example, a university famous for its lawyers managed to waste an estimated half million pounds defending a simple contract claim eventually decided upon just a few pages of original correspondence. Once the lawsuit got going, the "now you see them, now you don't" tease began in earnest, and its detail was instructive: early on, anxious to keep the Delegates from involvement in, and even knowledge of, the case, Oxford's solicitor described them to the court as "a body of distinguished old gentlemen who meet only once a year", while in another memorable exchange, with the then Secretary to the Delegates vainly resisting a summons, Oxford's counsel likened their role to that of the shareholders in a company. "Don't you mean the directors?" came the obvious rejoinder. "No, the shareholders." Yet whenever the converse suited, the staff would hide behind the Delegates, at one stage resting Oxford's entire defence upon the irrelevant claim that my book had never come before them, a ploy which entangled several aghast University eminences in the action [5], and which in any case quickly collapsed in the face of the evidence.
In his Court of Appeal judgment, Mustill LJ wrote: The history of the interlocutory proceedings suggest that there was a failure of communication between the respondents' legal advisers and those in charge at the Press. Could it also be that the Delegates whose interests are so directly in suit were out of touch with what was going on in the action? Could it be that they did not know what had been, what was being, said about the stance adopted by the Press?
In fact, however, assuming that I would surely find amongst them someone of honour and good sense to bring a halt to the burgeoning travesty, on two occasions I personally wrote to every Delegate, [6] informing them of the issues and querying their solicitor's claim that they met only "once a year". [Not one denied it] (In fact, in term-time, they meet at least fortnightly.) All backed away, all washed their hands of Walton Street's chicaneries, which soon descended to the depths of ignominious farce: half-a-dozen different defences, each one of which would have stood publishing law on its head [7]; [several affidavits later admitted to be false; see note 8] numerous documents denied, withheld and doctored [9]; the public denigration of my book, of which, it turned out, the Press had no copy [10]; the obstruction of evidence about trade practice [11]; packages of damning new papers, posted anonymously [12]; a "public apology" that had Mustill LJ reaching for his Bible; bizarre courtroom antics; traumatized testimony; unscrupulous financial threats [13]; you name it. Surely, had the Delegates been properly in charge, or had I been dealing with an ordinary publisher, none of these absurdities would have come to pass. Good heavens, they might simply have printed the 2,000 copies of my book, or perhaps even published it.
The Intifada Spreads: The Guardian, 3rd March 2001
[My case can, incidentally, definitively answer another financial question recently raised by Oxford English don Valentine Cunningham and the _THES_ in Mammon's Imprint, February 12: Does Oxford's charitable press pay its academic authors a proper rate? My contracting editor had specified that I would be paid "a fair royalty" and I assumed that this meant the trade norm of ten percent of the hardback's published price. In my damages assessment however, OUP's Managing Director (Arts and Reference) Ivon Asquith stated on affidavit that this norm was not applied by the Press "except in special cases", and Oxford's Q.C. Harvey McGregor on record asserted that OUP's rates were well below the market's, at one point arguing, to the court's amazement, that my paperback royalty would have been less than five percent. In the event, the court applied compromise figures of 8 percent (hardback) and 5.5 percent (paperback). But, to resume, see note 14]
If the true power over OUP's broad publishing and financial policies does not lie with the Delegates, some of who claim to have been bypassed over the poetry, where does it lie? The answer, of course, is with its shadowy, unelected Finance Committee, of which Sir Keith Thomas is chairman. In a Times letter (February 9), Henry Reece, the present Secretary, mentions OUP's "remit", and Sir Keith himself talks of its obligations and objectives, as though his declared profit-making [milk-cow] role were laid down somewhere. In fact though, the University statutes are silent on the Press's policies, and Archbishop Laud's original Royal Charter was simply for "the printing of all manner of books". In truth therefore, OUP's "remit" is whatever Sir Keith and his colleagues privately choose it to be; it is within their gift to "transfer" its odd £50 million surplus back to the University, forward to the modern poetry list, or each way on the nearest horse.
Can and should this arbitrary, unaccountable, insecure situation at one of Britain's most important publishers continue? Is OUP's present systematically ambivalent ethos fair to its staff, its authors, its readers or its rivals? Is it fair, indeed, to the University? No-one, after all, is suggesting that the grand old press should be dismantled, or that its worldwide operations should be curtailed, just that there must surely be a better way of constituting it. How about this:
- Make of Sir Keith's duchess a less dishonest woman by formalizing her divorce from the duke; that is, legally and financially separate Press and University.
- Annul her charitable status and have her pay tax, so that she can at last ply her commercialism naked and untrammelled; sooner or later this is likely to be forced upon her anyway, either here or in America.
- Relieve her of her vague "duty" to fund the University; tutorial system aside, her new taxed status would then justify the Government funding of the University's shortfall, and provided the Press continued in surplus, tax and shortfall might balance or better.
- The University appoint for her a board of professional directors, who would reinvest part of her profits back into expanding the business and part (the equivalent, say, of shareholders' dividends) into academic and non-commercial publishing like poetry, over which the Delegates could retain editorial control.
Should anyone think this simple scheme hare-brained, perhaps they will recall that not so long ago in 1987, when OUP was doing financially badly, a group of dons proposed selling a 49 percent stake to Robert Maxwell, and that only last year numerous Oxonians were campaigning enthusiastically to privatize their colleges [15]. Stranger things have happened.
Andrew Malcolm's philosophy text Making Names (1992) and account of the lawsuit The Remedy (1997) are available from
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NOTES
* As a result of this article's publication, I learned that my assumptions here about the origins of OUP's (and CUP's) 'charitable status' were incorrect. In fact, the Oxbridge presses enjoy something rather less formal and rather more vulnerable, private letters from the Inland Revenue exempting them from corporation tax. This exemption is not automatic, was only granted surprisingly recently - in the mid 1970s, and is conditional, chiefly (a) that any "surpluses" are ploughed back into "non-commercial publishing" (like poetry) and (b) that they do not fund their universities. Both presses are now wildly and flagrantly in breach of these two conditions. For the full facts go to The Surprising Truth about OUP's 'Charitable Status'. Also see CUP's Tax-exemption. [Return to text].
1. James Fenton, Oxford's Professor of Poetry, wrote Beware the Philistines of Publishing in The Times of November 25th 1998. Nigel Smith and Nicholas Shrimpton, co-Chairmen of Oxford's Faculty Board of English Language and Literature, wrote a letter in The Times of December 2nd 1998: "We wish to dissociate ourselves from the decision, of which we had no prior warning, and we call upon OUP to reinstate the poetry list at the earliest opportunity." Jon Stallworthy, Oxford English Literature Professor, former OUP Publisher, and founder of the Modern Poetry list, wrote a letter in The Times of December 12th 1998: "...contraception is not the same as murder of a healthy 39-year-old." Valentine Cunninham, Oxford English Literature Professor, wrote a colourful article Mammon's Imprint in The Times Higher Education Supplement of February 12th 1999: "OUP is making a fool of itself..." and so forth. Return to text. (2nd ref).
3. The agreement of 1st July 1992 was sealed by Chancery Master Barratt in the form of a Consent or 'Tomlin' Order. Clauses 1-5 of the order concerned damages and costs; Clause 6 imposed mutual undertakings of confidentiality; and, since there had already been a history of public denigration by the university of me and my book, Clause 7 was the following reciprocal undertaking by the university, "of unlimited duration":
> "The defendants (the Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford) agree that they, their servants and agents, or any of them, will not publish or solicit the publication of any derogatory statements, letters or articles about Andrew Malcolm or about the merits or quality of his work Making Names. For the purpose of giving effect to this undertaking, the defendants may disclose the text of this term to their servants and agents from time to time. The defendants further agree to request Alan Ryan, Henry Hardy and Richard Charkin not to publish or solicit the publication of any derogatory statements, letters or articles about Andrew Malcolm or about the merits or quality of his work Making Names."
By the time of this agreement's signing, the three individuals named in Clause 7's last sentence had all left Oxford. Henry Hardy was the OUP editor who in May 1985 had commissioned Making Names (e.g. 21st May and 14th June). Richard Charkin was OUP's Managing Director who had then overruled Hardy and tried (unsuccessfully) to sack him. Alan Ryan was the OUP Delegate/referee who in two reports in 1985 (11th February and 18th July), had recommended the book's publication but then changed his mind after Malcolm had spent seven months revising the book to Oxford's specifications. For the full documentation, go to The 1985-92 Case Papers Index. Return to text.
4. The editor was (Doctor) Henry Hardy, who, once the lawsuit started, for six years "followed Oxford's instructions". Under cross-examination in court, he uttered the words "I have no clear recollection" no less than thirty times. After I won the case, Hardy left OUP and was given a Wolfson College grant to edit the papers of Isaiah Berlin, and when Making Names was eventually published, he wrote me a letter, the first in a bizarre series, in which he said "You may have wondered, but I have never deviated from my view that it ought to be published, and I am very pleased that it now has been." 9 years on, click for Hardy's review of The Remedy for the Times Higher (Education Supplement), 30th March 2001.
Hardy's head of department was Will Sulkin, who later moved to Faber and then Jonathan Cape (Random Century). The Delegate/referee who supported Making Names' publication was Alan Ryan (now Warden of New College), who after five years of tergiversation wrote to me for the first time in April 1990 after the trial as follows:
"I must say I am more surprised by the behaviour of the Press's solicitors than anything. It is quite clear that Henry Hardy did not have the authority to issue a contract single-handed, and so far as I can see the Press would have been wise to rely on that defence from the beginning [if they had, they would of course at once have lost - A. M.]. As to the merits of the case, my own sense is that we [that is Ryan and myself] were at cross purposes from the start, and that that was at the heart of the matter. I liked the book on first reading and thought that..."
When it eventually came to damages, the Delegate who had in 1984/5 "got the ball rolling" for the book from the safety of America thoroughly trashed it:
"Eccentric, quirky, boorish, alienating, very unclear, unfathomable and overlong... likely to sell only four or five hundred copies and vanish from sight... would have sunk without trace."
The department managing director who, "without knowing anything about Making Names or even having enquired as to its contents" axed it, was Richard Charkin, who served Hardy with a disciplinary warning preparatory to dismissal, requiring the two men to submit formal charges, which Oxford was later obliged to produce. Both men confirmed the existence of Oxford's contract. The "long-running power struggle" between them was Hardy's phrase, not mine. Richard Charkin is presently Chief Executive of Macmillan.
The Secretary to the Delegates throughout the relevant period (and long-standing OUP Finance Committee chairman) was Sir Roger Elliott (later the President of the Publishers' Association).
5. A round of approaches in 1989 to ex-Delegates of 1985 yielded several who confirmed the existence (denied by Elliott) of lists of General Books and some who could even remember Making Names, including the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah (subsequently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge), the economist Amartya Sen (presently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge), the Wittgensteinian philosopher David (D. F.) Pears, an English don Doctor R. H. Lonsdale, the then Junior Proctor Glenn Black, and the Vice-Chancellor's secretary Anne Smallwood. A few days prior to the Chancery Court trial in March 1990, I served subpoenas on Atiyah, Black and Smallwood, but at the last moment these were set aside. Return to text.
6. After the Chancery Court trial of March 1990, I again sent all the Delegates another letter, enclosing a copy of the judgment, in which the judge urged the Press to "make amends" and "reconsider its decision" (i.e. publish Making Names). Return to text.
7. Oxford's various attempted defences: (1) That OUP's Senior General Books Editor, of eight years' standing, had no legal authority contractually to negotiate with an author. (2) That the Delegates (of whom at the time I knew nothing) had not formally approved the book - a claim which the evidence eventually proved untrue. (3) That we (I and Oxford) had not formally agreed the book's print-run, (4) format (hardback or paperback) or (5) retail price. In fact, Hardy and I had informally agreed these points (2,000 copies of a £15 hardback); these figures were entered on a PPF form. (6) That OUP's only condition (that my revised draft should not be worse than the original - agreed fulfilled) was too subjective to be contractual. Return to text.
8. This clause was edited out by the TLS's lawyers for fear of a libel suit. If so, their worry was understandable but unnecessary: two of Oxford's affidavits were later on court record admitted by their own deponents to have been false - Henry Hardy's of 20/1/89 and Ivon Asquith's first of 3/8/88; two were singled out in court judgments - Hardy's by Justice Morritt and Justice Lightman, and Asquith's first and second of 18/8/88, which Justice Lightman described as "calculated to mislead"; while Sir Roger Elliott's first of 19/7/89 is simply contradicted by his second of 31/1/90, by his third of 16/10/90, by various subsequent items of evidence (see note 12), and by commonsense. In the Chancery court trial, Justice Lightman rejected Hardy's testimony in its entirety (see judgment), while Lord Justice Mustill's comments are condensed in judgment extracts. Return to text.
9. Oxford's discovery of documents lasted three years, was the subject of several court hearings, was castigated by various of the judges (see especially Lightman), and to this day remains incomplete (see note 12).
Several of Oxford's photocopied papers were later found to have had handwritten additions and notes erased from the copies in evidence. In one potentially crucial document, the Delegates' Note for Making Names, this became material. On the original, which it took two years to force Oxford to produce, it was found that the editor Hardy had written the date of the Delegates' meeting (23rd July 1985) at which the book had been approved. Return to text.
10. After the Chancery Court trial, Sir Roger Elliott wrote a letter that appeared in The Bookseller magazine, in which he said "we did not think that Mr Malcolm's book had either the intellectual quality or the commercial potential necessary to justify publication by OUP," and Oxford's 'Public Apology' at the Appeal generously added that "many manuscripts of greater merit have to be rejected by OUP every year." Apart from running exactly counter to the reports written at the time by OUP's own referees, these assertions were exposed when I won the Appeal and Oxford was obliged to admit that it had no copy of the script. Return to text.
11. At the Appeal, Oxford not only argued that our contract was incomplete because we had not formally agreed the print-run, but even tried to block the admission of trade evidence (common knowledge anyway) that print-runs are rarely, if ever, agreed in publishing contracts. When this blocking attempt was unsuccessful, Oxford offered no counter-evidence of its own, thereby conceding that its defence was untrue. For more on this and for Oxford's "public apology" (its second, typed version), go to the Court of Appeal judgment. Return to text.
12. Between the trial and the Appeal, perhaps as a result of the growing publicity, I received two anonymous packages of evidence which confirmed Making Names' approval by the Delegates. The first Cambridge package contained a list of educational books and ten 'Delegates' Notes' of approved books, including Making Names. The second 'Adrasteia' package contained several Delegates' lists of hardback General Books, including one dated 19th July 1985 which again featured Making Names. By that stage, however, Oxford had abandoned its "Delegates' approval" defence and was relying solely on the "no agreed print-run" evidence.
The paperbacks list for the Delegates' meeting of 23rd July 1985, which other evidence suggests might also have featured Making Names (Hardy had also confided that he had planned to launch it simultaneously in both formats, once the book was approved), to this day remains undiscovered. Return to text.
13. For the detail on these and other aspects, scholars are advised to order a copy of The Remedy. Return to text.
14. This tangential paragraph, I think, was edited out by the TLS to save space. Click for more on OUP's royalty rates. Return to text.
15. The 'privatise OUP' campaign resurfaced with a letter by Doctor Graham Richards in the Oxford Magazine early in 1987, and was taken up by The Times & Sunday Times. Roger Elliott's response appeared in the Times Higher. The 'privatise the colleges' campaign hit the newspapers in early 1997, e.g. The Sunday Telegraph.
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POSTSCRIPTS
Predictably and gratifyingly, Oxford University and its magisterial Press reacted to this article with... a grand and total silence. Sir Keith Thomas said nothing whatever to The Times Literary Supplement, at least, "nothing for publication", and the only formal OU(P) response appears to have been the brief withdrawal of its advertising from the TLS (see issues from April 23rd). Yes, things really are that dull. One Oxford letter, however, did appear in the magazine, from a Patrick Thomas (presumably no relation), of 22 Cripley Road, who (9th April) wrote as follows:
Sir, - Andrew Malcolm's commentary (April 2) on the ills of the Oxford University Press is almost totally irrelevant to the current difficulties confronting the press.
OUP's main problem is that it is not making enough money at a time when it needs money more than ever, both to invest in its own development and in the development of the university. In the main part, this situation is the result of falling revenues from the English Language Training division, which has been hit by the financial crisis in the Far East, but it is also related to the Press's reluctance to do what is necessary to maximize the profitability of its monograph publishing activities.
Scholarly monograph publishing can be very profitable. The maths of it work like this: each monograph sells a small but relatively certain number of copies, because certain libraries feel they have to keep full and up-to-date collections. If you cut production and editorial costs to the minimum and increase the number of titles you produce, it is possible to make very healthy profits - enough to finance the poetry list ten times over. The downside is that quality control goes out of the window. With it goes everything that publication is supposed to stand for in the academic world, and a large chunk of academic library budgets. OUP has quite rightly stood out against this approach to monographs. The corollary of this is that the commissioning process is more complex, and conflicts such as that with Mr Malcolm become more likely. However, would Malcolm have wanted to be published by OUP so much if he knew it was nothing more than a sausage-machine monograph factory?
In today's world of publishing, OUP's stance is undoubtedly charitable. It means that OUP's monograph publishing is unprofitable. It means that the Press is losing market share to publishers who are prepared to flood the market with unpicked monographs. It means that it is effectively bearing the brunt of the cost of supporting a system of academic advancement based on publication, while all of its competitors are taking the profits from undermining it.
Sadly, charitable status is not enough to to dig OUP out of the hole in which it is. Right now it needs more sales or lower costs, or there is going to be trouble. More sales are out of the question. This is primarily because, with the exception of OED3, all of its major investments over the past eight years have not been in publishing. Instead the money has gone into swanky new offices, new computer systems, state-of-the-art distribution facilities and a Mexican publishing company which was acquired just in time for the devaluation of the peso.
Cutting costs is difficult. You can close the poetry list, pack the music list off to New York, restructure your departments and divisions, firing a few junior staff along the way, but you cannot go too much further without hitting standards. The Press is running the risk of becoming a sausage-machine monograph factory by default.
There is a third way, but it may involve more self-confidence and imagination than the Press has. Money can be raised by selling off some of the profitable but peripheral activities (such as the music-publishing business). This can then be reinvested in transforming the core scholarly publishing business.
The opportunity is there for OUP to seize the initiative, to kick over the corrupt monograph-publishing edifice and to reestablish the primacy of peer-review and academic standards in a new world of electronic scholarly communications. Such a route would, however, require a leap of faith: selling the music-publishing division would mean sacrificing a very nice annuity inherited from the previous generation of publishers for something rather less certain.
However, such boldness would justify not just the hoo-ha over the sale of the poetry list, but it would also guarantee the charitable status of the Press for a generation.
To the above letter, under the heading OUP's constitution, I wrote the following reply, unpublished by the TLS:
Sir, - I am puzzled by Patrick Thomas's knowledgeable and interesting letter of April 9, which begins by declaring my War for Jericho (April 2) irrelevant to OUP's ills, yet whose numerous points then proceed to confirm my argument.
Can it possibly make sense for a major university's income to be so directly dependent upon the vagaries of the Indonesian stock exchange or the gullibility of Californian library buyers? Can it possibly make sense for a major publisher to have lately donated £50 million to charity, yet now be so broke it cannot afford to print a few slim poetry volumes? Doesn't OUP's list of recent financial blunders now demand its more professional management?
The only point on which Patrick Thomas seems to be ignorant concerns my own history: my philosophy text Making Names was neither submitted by me, nor accepted by OUP, as "a scholarly monograph." It was handled throughout, as I wished, by the General Books Division, whose three Oxford referees unanimously recommended its publication. As in the recent poetry case, it then fell foul of a power struggle between my contracting editor and a financial manager who had no knowledge whatsoever of the book's contents but was worried by its £5,000 cost. Even in my damages hearing years later, Oxford's independent expert witness, the Editorial Director of CUP, could find no intellectual fault with the book, but testified only to his marketing doubts. As Lord Justice Mustill urged in his Court of Appeal judgment: "Let there be no mistake about it, the failure of this transaction was about money, not prestige." Plus ça change.
In fact, of course, Thomas's obviously well-informed, curate's egg (curate's sausage?) letter is in parts a fine, if unintended, critique of the standards, ethos and future of academic publishing in general, not just OUP's. Each of the many of good points he makes could doubtless generate a useful and lively discussion, and they certainly provide a very handy introduction to my subsequent TLS article An Ultra Short Run, on the subject of print-on-demand. - A. M.
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