Push the Key

I can’t believe this stuff still happens.

The New York Times reports that Raymond Sokolov, the restaurant critic for the Wall Street Journal, is up in arms because another publisher has a book on its 2008 spring list with much the same title as one he wrote more than thirty years ago. Sokolov’s book, The Saucier’s Apprentice: A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home was published by Knopf back in 1976. The book that will be published in May of this year by W.W. Norton, is The Saucier’s Apprentice: One Long Strange Trip Through the Cooking Schools of Europe. The author of the Norton book is Bob Spitz, who wrote The Beatles: The Biography, the definitive work on the Fab Four.

All Sokolov can do is “stew” (no pun intended), because titles cannot by copyrighted. He is convinced that Norton knew about his book, and maintains that their decision to go ahead and publish anyway was “in bad taste.” Nach Waxman, the owner of New York’s Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore, agrees with Sokolov: “It’s derivative of a book that is still in print in the same field and that has 30 years standing.”

For his part, Spitz claims that he came up with the title when he was working on the proposal, and had no idea that Sokolov’s book was out there. He said, moreover, that he interviewed “a lot of people” for his book, and they were also in the dark. This happens all too often.

While it would be nice if authors made sure that their book does not have the same or similar title to one still in circulation, it’s the responsibility of the publisher, ultimately, to vet a book proposal for things that can come back to bite them. Today, this means, at minimum, conducting a search on Amazon. If Spitz or anyone at Norton bothered to do that, they would have found Sokolov’s book. If they searched on “Saucier’s Apprentice” on Google, they would have found links to Sokolov’s book on Amazon, Alibris, Random House, and the WorldCat library catalog. There is simply no excuse for this kind of omission.

If I were a publisher, I would not depend on just the free Internet resources mentioned above. I would pay to subscribe to Bowker’s Books In Print, whose core business is not selling books, but maintaining a complete database of all books published or announced for publication since the inception of the ISBN in 1968.