The BooksellerNicholas Clee on the latest news from the world of publishing
RICHARD J Evans’s Telling Lies About Hitler, out from Verso next week, may be unique: a book for which Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie has negotiated no advance. The deal between the small left wing publisher and the powerful literary agent follows a complicated series of publishing manoeuvres.
Evans was the chief defence witness in the libel action brought by David Irving against Penguin and Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust. His painstaking research discredited Irving, whom Mr Justice Gray, finding for the defence, branded as someone who “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”, and who displayed “all the characteristics of a Holocaust denier”. 
The judgment, one might have thought, would put paid to Irving’s ability to wield any influence at all. But, as Walter Brennan asked, “Have you ever been stung by a dead bee?”
William Heinemann commissioned Telling Lies About Hitler, but dropped it, citing legal reasons. In the Observer last Sunday, Nick Cohen attacked Heinemann, as well as other publishers that later declined the book, for their “gutlessness”.
Cohen was unfair about Granta’s position: the publisher was preparing to bring out Telling Lies About Hitler, and had increased its libel insurance, when it fell out with Evans and Wylie over contractual arrangements. Nevertheless, some companies were clearly afraid of a discredited figure.
Irving has intimidated booksellers too. He had threatened them when they put Denying the Holocaust on sale, and he wrote to potential distributors of the US edition of Telling Lies About Hitler alleging that the book was defamatory. Some wrote back to assure him that they would not stock it.
The intimidation of booksellers by the likes of Irving — Robert Maxwell and Neil and Christine Hamilton are among the others who have tried it — may be coming to an end. The Law Commission is supporting a proposal that the defamation act be amended so that plaintiffs may not sue retailers without also suing the author or the publisher of the book concerned.
David Irving comments:
IT BEGINS to look as though a certain professor is just itching to get somebody to take a swing at him in The Strand. Look at that interesting line about the Granta firm having “increased its libel insurance”, in anticipation of publishing the Evans book; what does that tell us about what even Granta thought about its content?
What effect might it have on a jury, to hear that publisher after publisher has clearly recognized that the proposed book is libellous, and that they are going into all these contortions to find some way of thwarting the Defamation Act.
The reason that plaintiffs (or “claimants” as they are now more properly called) used to sue distributors as well as authors was that distributors had the money to meet the costs, whereas authors often did not; and publishers were sometimes straw companies with no assets (the publisher of the smear-sheet Searchlight is an example). We happen to know that Professor Evans recently came into some money, so the former condition does not obtain. 
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Nicholas Clee is editor of The Bookseller. Readers of the Guardian can subscribe to it for £13.35 per month and receive the next eight issues free at My Subscriptions
IT BEGINS to look as though a certain professor is just itching to get somebody to take a swing at him in The Strand 
Table: 
write to David Irving