Libel Risks

Saturday,
March 8, 2003

The
Bookseller

Nicholas
Clee on the latest news from the publishing industry

David
Irving comments:

OF COURSE I have had no contact with Amazon whatever.
This is just another
Guardian lie. I have no objection whatever to a publisher publishing, and a bookseller selling, books that propagate the truth; if a book contains deliberate, malicious and defamatory lies however, then both author and bookseller must continue to risk the consequences. Since
Deborah Lipstadt’s lies cost her publisher Penguin around
£3 million in unrecoverable legal and other expenses, part

of them ironically the bribes paid to Professor Richard “Skunky”
Evans for his testimony in the trial, their reluctance to publish future works by her and other authors is understandable. More serious for Evans is not the prospect of a civil action for libel, but a criminal action for perjury, which a legal adviser has recommended to me press.

Related file:

The
latest company to be worried about him is
Amazon.co.uk, which has removed from sale
Telling Lies About Hitler (Verso),
Richard J Evans’s account of
Irving’s libel action against Penguin
Books and Deborah Lipstadt. Professor
Evans was the chief defence witness at the
trial, and he uncovered the telling
material that led to the branding of
Irving as someone who “persistently and
deliberately misrepresented and
manipulated historical evidence”.

Telling Lies About Hitler has a complicated history, recounted in this column before. Amazon appears to have sold it until January. The problem is that booksellers may be liable for prosecution if they are told that a book is potentially defamatory – and Irving has given Amazon that message. The company says:

“We will not list Telling Lies
About Hitler or any other book over the
objections that the book contains
defamatory content, at least not
without a commitment by the publisher
to defend us in any legal action
brought against us under UK law.”

Verso says that it does not feel inclined to indemnify a retailer that has already removed the book from sale. Amazon says that the law as it stands has “a chilling effect on free speech”.

AMAZON continues to sell David Irving’s books. It draws the line, though, at
Mein Kampf. Those are defensible policies: one expects booksellers to promote liberal dissemination, up to a point. Publishers, too, should defend free speech, as Penguin did when it supported
Deborah Lipstadt; but they also have the right to select the material they produce.

This principle appears not to have been grasped by Jonathan King, who wrote to me following my story last week about Michael
Moore’s praise of Penguin, publisher of his (Moore’s) book Stupid White Men. King (prisoner FF8782), currently contesting his conviction for sexual offences against minors, offered Penguin an autobiography entitled King and I, and received in response “a terse statement that they were not interested in anything I had to offer”.

King concludes: “So much for freedom of expression.”

A criminal record need not hinder a writer’s career: Lord Archer continues to bring out books, and people convicted of far worse crimes than perjury have found publishing deals. Nevertheless, a publisher may be excused for judging that a King memoir would not be a viable project. Turning down a book is not censorship.

The editor who told an author that she hated the author and the author’s books, and the publisher who passed off an author’s work as her own, are among the horror stories in the latest Society of
Authors survey of publishers. Since the last survey six years ago, authors have grown slightly more disenchanted, awarding publishers lower marks in almost every category.

Marketing and publicity efforts were a particular source of dissatisfaction; authors also complained about the effect on their books when new editors took charge of them, and about late payments.
They were happier, though, with publishers’ production standards. Four independent houses came in for the highest praise: Constable & Robinson, Faber,
Robert Hale and John Murray. (The results cover the period before Murray was bought by Hodder Headline.)

But some conglomerates did well, too: the SoA’s members gave largely favourable reports on
Hodder Headline, Pan Macmillan, Penguin and Random House.