'Scurrilous Forgery' Has FSG Scrambling

by Lynn Andriani, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/22/2006

The world of British letters was the stage for a minor brouhaha earlier this month, when Bevis Hillier, a biographer of England's poet laureate John Betjeman, duped another of Betjeman's biographers, A. N. Wilson, into including a spoof love letter in his book Betjeman: A Life, which Hutchinson published in the U.K. in August. Hillier may have initially been hoping for the fake letter to have deep repercussions, but when he fessed up to writing the phony letter, it seemed to be the end of things. But not for Wilson's American publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

FSG's plans to bring out Betjeman: A Life in the U.S. in December were thwarted by the bogus document; when the scandal broke, the house already had brought in finished books from the U.K. to sell in the U.S., which contained the fraudulent letter as well as incorrect information regarding it. The solution, according to FSG senior v-p of marketing and publicity Jeff Seroy, was to include an erratum note from Wilson in all 10,000 copies of the book's first editions, and to correct the text (and omit Hillier's made-up document) in all future editions. Seroy doesn't believe the scandal will hurt sales and thinks the American media's coverage of the spoof note (in the New York Times and elsewhere) may help in "piquing people's curiosity, and renewing interest in this poet laureate."

In his erratum note, Wilson comes across as a good sport, explaining how he received the letter and his hindsight view: "I should have smelt a rat when I wrote back to 'Eve de Harben,' an anagram of 'Ever been had?'" Keeping a stiff upper lip, Wilson ends with the declaration that the "scurrilous forgery will be removed in any future reprints."