Generalising

While writing something about Wikipedia, and talking about the idea of tracable attribution of text, I’ve been thinking of ways in which works with multiple discrete authors have displayed the different contributions of those authors.

At one extreme, there’s a fully “collaborative” work – no-one makes a distinction between the two authors, and while they’re named on the title page the writing is implicitly attributed to both. At the other extreme, we have individual chapters or articles – A writes chapter 1, B writes chapter 2, etc., and they may never have known of the other contributors.

In the middle, there’s cases where the work is broadly collaborative but with individual elements – the main text is jointly written, but particular contributors sign their own footnotes, sidebar sections, forewords, appendices, etc.

The one that interests me, though, is something I saw in I.S. Shklovsky’s Intelligent Life in the Universe when I read it as a student – I seem to have lost my copy in the intervening ten years, so this is from memory.

The book was originally published in the USSR in the early 1960s, and translated and expanded in English with the aid of Carl Sagan later in the decade. The original text was updated by Sagan, who also added several new chapters; the two then shared drafts, editing “each other’s” sections. Given the political climate, however, they were keen to avoid claiming to be in agreement on some sensitive topics, and so they experimented with explicitly marking the appearance of a single voice in the text itself.

In the end, the result ran something like:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. ▲Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.▼ △Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.▽

Unmarked text was jointly written; black triangles marked remarks by one author, and white triangles by another. (At at least one point, delightfully, they started arguing.)

So, the question: was this something common in the period that I’ve just never noticed elsewhere? Is there a name for it? What other novel ways of marking authorship have been used?

A moment of amusement, from the (thankfully) long-distant past:

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which contains more than 100,000 entries and fills fifty-one volumes, includes some distortions so flamboyant as to be beyond belief. These are an old story. But such distortions have importance [...]

Almost everyone has heard about what happened to Beria in the Encyclopedia. After his liquidation, subscribers were notified, with full instructions, that they should snip out the article about him and insert in its place substitute articles which were duly enclosed, about the Bering Strait and an obscure eighteenth-century statesman named Berholtz. These were the best available substitutes beginning with ‘Ber’. During Stalin’s day when the party line changed on some matter so important that the Encyclopedia itself had to be changed, subscribers were obliged to turn in the volume affected to the party secretary; it was pulped and a new whole volume, cut and patched, was then sent out to the subscriber. Nowadays the reader is allowed to keep the book, and trusted to make the proper emendation himself. Progress!

Another person ‘expelled’ from the Encyclopedia was a Chinese Communist leader, Kao Kang. To replace him, a substitute page went out dealing with a city in Tibet. [...] In their haste to make the revision, the editors overlooked the fact that the same Tibetan city also appeared elsewhere in the Encyclopaedia, spelled differently.

– John Gunther, Inside Russia Today (Penguin, 1964).

A recent post in Charlie Stross’s series on misconceptions about publishing (more on which anon, hopefully), has an interesting side-note:

Interestingly, the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors’ incomes … The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74.

I felt you could make a dramatic comparison from that, so I went to check the figures. The surprising thing is, though, Gini coefficients that high just don’t usually exist on a national level – there’s only one or two countries where we have the data to reasonably conclude it’s as high as 0.7. (Namibia, if you’re wondering). The reason for this is that rural hinterlands tend to reduce the effect of the inequalities of the cities (which are, obviously, where you find both the urban shantytowns and the wealthy metropolitan elite).

Are there, then, specific cities where it’s this bad? Yes. Again, just. The worst cities in the world, by inequality, are the major metropolises of South Africa; even there, it peaks at about 0.75. So, visualise it that way for a second: the population of people in the UK who are paid to write, full-time or part-time, has a level of economic inequality on a par with that of the population of Johannesburg.

It’s quite a staggering image, really. You realise it’s a very sharp differential, but you don’t realise it’s that steep!

I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

It’s illegal, see. It’s illegal because of International Copyright Law. This has initial caps so those of us who aren’t lawyers may sit back and go “oooh! ahhh!”, except, not. I could go into the whole doctrine of fair use, of parody, and could discuss the simple fact that copyright law is certainly not international – it’s different by jurisdiction, but I’m sure you knew that and, let’s be honest, I could probably write my entire thesis on the subject of fanfiction and the law and oh, look, OTW already have.

But, I don’t know, it just seems to me that Gabaldon’s major gaffe here is very much commercial. As someone comments on fandom_wank, what’s she gonna do? Chase down every instance of fanfic on the internet and thus implicitly condone the ones she misses? And of course, telling her fans, who buy her books, the fact of the wee stories they wrote on the internet makes her want to throw up is very sound commercial sense, oh wait I might be lying there.

Then there’s this:

While not all fan-fic is pornographic by any means, enough of it _is_ that it constitutes an aesthetic argument against the whole notion.

As I say, I’ve unwillingly read a certain amount of fan-fic involving my characters, and about three-quarters of it is graphic, badly-written (of the “his searing touch blazed its way up the silken skin of her thigh to the secret depths of her ecstasy” type) masturbatory fantasy. I mean….ick.

She said that. I mean, seriously, seriously, she actually said that.

From Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, pg. 237 [British edition]:

Percy’s own cold hand slid down between them, grasped him. Cold as the touch was, it seemed to burn. He felt the seam of his breeches give as Percy shoved them roughly done and wondered dimly what he would tell Tom. Then Percy’s prick rubbed hard against his own, stiff, hot, and he stopped thinking.

From pg. 294:

“Did you ever wonder what it’s like?” [Percy] asked suddenly. “To be flogged?”

Grey felt a clenching in his stomach, but answered honestly. “Yes. Now and then.” Once, at least.

Percy had been kneading one of the red baize bags, like a cat sharpening its claws. Now he let it fall to the floor, and took up the cat o’nine tails itself, a short handle with a cluster of leather cords. “Do you want to find out?” he said, very softly.

“What?” An extraordinary feeling ran through Grey, half-fear, half-excitement.

“Take off your coat,” Percy said, still softly.

I don’t, alas, have my copies of the other books, or I could treat you all to more in the way of sexual fantasy. Believe me, there’s more.

Also? She writes books, right. Enormous doorstops of books about Love! And Time-Travel! And Men In Kilts Called Jamie Fraser!

Poor, dear, Jamie McCrimmon. S’all I’m sayin’.

Cookbook misprint costs Australian publishers dear.

So, a publisher in Australia managed to publish a cookbook with a recipe that called for “salt and freshly ground black people”.

Oops.

I’m sure I would have had much more sympathy for said publisher, though, had he not been quoted as saying, “[W]hy anyone would be offended, we don’t know”, and “proofreading a cook-book is an extremely difficult task”.

I don’t know, I might not buy books from a publisher that finds it very difficult not to accidentally advocate grinding up black people.

From a Glasgow bookseller writing to The Bookman in February 1895:

…some publishers are doing their utmost to ruin the trade by selling to the drapers, who buy large quantities at reduced prices

(The “drapers” were, of course, the large general retailers. By the 1890s, the term was about as exact as calling Sainsbury’s a grocers.)

That was not the only complaint that could have been lifted straight from last week’s Bookseller. This one from 1905 -

…[the Bookman] was quite relieved to note that recently published children’s books, though dangerously full of humour, were not so absurdly grotesque as in recent years.

Both quotes are from Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by “The Bookman”, 1891-1906 (2001) [JSTOR], a study of the most popular books sold in Britain at the turn of the century. (There were no bestseller lists per se at the time – the bulk of the article was an attempt to retractively construct one based on returns from booksellers. It is sobering how many of them are completely forgotten…)

In an interesting move, Amazon (.com, anyway) recently pulled a large number of books published by Macmillan, or its imprints; this was a reaction to a dispute over how to establish the sale & distribution conditions for ebooks.

(Basically: two big players having a game of chicken, and someone is blinking a bit later than usual. It caused… some entirely justified outcry from the people caught in the middle.)

Charlie Stross has an interesting explanation about the two duelling models of the publishing supply chain here – basically, Amazon trying to grab a slice of the cake that previously went to the publishers.