Court Orders Penguin To Recall Parker Book
by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 6/16/2003
U.S. District Court Judge John F. Keenan has denied a motion by Penguin asking the court to issue a stay, pending an appellate hearing, of its decision ordering the publisher to recall copies of Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems. In April, Keenan found that Penguin's Complete Poems had infringed the copyright of Stuart Silverstein's Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner) and issued an injunction prohibiting Penguin from shipping additional copies (News, Apr. 14). A Penguin spokesperson said the company will file an immediate notice of appeal of the stay ruling, which it expects will be consolidated with its first appeal.
After denying Penguin's request for a stay, Keenan issued an immediate permanent injunction prohibiting the publisher from publishing, selling or marketing Complete Poems, and he ordered Penguin to recall all copies that it has distributed. Penguin is also required to publish an ad in PW notifying its accounts of the recall and requesting the return of any copies, for which retailers will be reimbursed. Attorney Monica McCabe, who represented Silverstein, called the ruling "the right decision—it sends a message to the big publishing houses to be careful about how they put books together."
Penguin first released Complete Poems in 1999 and has 22,000 copies in print. A Penguin spokesperson noted that the company has been publishing Parker's titles for 75 years, and royalties now go to the Parker Estate, which donates the funds to the NAACP.
