The newest scandal in the British publishing industy involves two warring John Betjeman biographers, a love letter hoax, an acrostic, and everyone’s fair dose of public shame. Who wants the film rights?

For A.N. Wilson, whose biography of the former British poet laureate came out this year to honour the 100th anniversary of of Betjeman’s birth, the story began about two years ago, when he recieved a copy of a document in the mail from a mysterious Eve de Harben. The document appeared to be a love letter from the late Mr. Betjeman to real-life friend Honor Tracy, and the sender purported to be Tracy’s cousin. Wilson, having no cause to believe that the letter was a fake, and no doubt ecstatic to have proof that Betjeman had a passionate affair 11 years after he had married his wife, gaily published the letter at the close of a chapter entitled “Betjeman at War.”

The letter theoretically might have stayed unquestioned for years, had not Eve de Harben sent a letter into The Sunday Times several weeks ago, exposing the letter as a fake. She explained it was revenge for an attack on a friend, the writer Humphrey Carpenter, who died in 2005. But curioser and curioser: no Eve de Harben was found at the return address on her letter to the Times, and when Wilson had tried earlier to return the copy of the letter to her, it came back to him stamped ‘addressee unknown.’ Furthermore, Mr. Carpenter’s widow, when contacted, insisted that her husband knew no one by the name of Wilson.

The time had come to realise that the name ‘Eve de Harben’ is an anagram for ‘Ever been had?’ (as the Press everywhere has been pointing out with glee). After all, the ‘letter’ sent to Mr. Wilson was revealed as containing an acrostic–that’s right, those things that primary-school teachers use to introduce ‘poetry’ to you and make you write a poem about yourself using the the letters of your name, and I rued the day that I was ever given one with so many letters. In the hoax epistle, the first letter of each sentence, with the exception of the first and the last three sentences, spells out ‘A.N. Wilson is a shit.’

Until Sunday, the perpetrator of the hoax remained at large, but speculations flew and largely settled on Bevis Hillier, who had spent 25 years amassing information and composing a biography on Betjeman, only to discover that Mr. Wilson was publishing one, too. Hillier finally confessed to authorship of the letter, conceding with the words “It’s a fair cop.”

For Hillier, then, the story obviously stretched back much further, to allow him to concoct such an elaborate imposture. It was not the discovery of Mr. Wilson’s feuding biography, however, but rather an unflattering review that Wilson published in The Spectator, condemning the second volume of Hillier’s biography as “a hopeless mishmash.” Hillier consequently dubbed Wilson “the playground bully of contemporary English literature,” thus, perhaps, unwittingly referencing the theme of delightfully child-like pranks to come. He was not actually pushed to creating the encoded insult until he read a favorable review of Wilson’s Betjeman: A Life in a national news paper.

Sophomoric? Perhaps. Hilarious? Without a doubt. Hillier’s inclusion in the letter of phrases like ‘Tinkerty-tonk,’ which only a Betjeman biographer could use, adds a degree of brilliance to the existing amusement that it supplies the ‘T’ in the final expletive. During Hillier’s brief but fervent period of denial, he said that the letter was “not the sort of lark I’d do,” but then added: “But it’s very Betjemanesque.”

Indeed. I am not without sympathy for Wilson, who finds himself in a rather sticky situation. On the other hand, I confess a bit of schadenfreude at the expense of literary biographers, always so eager to unveil scandal in their subjects, not to mention one who failed to do a little bit more research about his source once the letter came back to him marked ‘adressee unknown.’ At the very least, it’s a secret delight to see “the old, learned, respectable bald heads,” to quote Yeats’s “The Scholars,” walk in the ways of their Catullus—or Betjeman.

You can see a copy of the letter at Ultrabrown (with some other amusing acrostics); read a blog discussion at Kitabkhana.

When New Yorker and illustrator Ernie Colón originally tried to read the 568-page 9/11 Report, he was forced to quit after about fifty pages. The Report, nominated for the National Book Award and widely praised for its unflinching criticism of the government’s failures, was nevertheless difficult to comprehend. “For a government report, it was well written–but still hard to follow,” Colón said, citing “a lot of things going on at the same time in different places.”

And so, a year later, when Colón read that a miniseries based on the 9/11 Report was under consideration, he contemplated making a graphic adaptation of the report’s findings. The 75-year-old illustrator, who has worked for Harvey, Marvel and DC Comics, decided to run the idea by his longtime friend and colleague, Sid Jacobson, who served as managing editor and editor-in-chief at Harvey Comics, and executive editor at Marvel Comics. Jacobson’s reaction was, in comic book terms, “Holy @#$%! What a great idea!”

Jacobson’s experience in reading the report was similar, and his difficulty led to further inspiration. “I had trouble following what was happening on the four (hijacked) flights,” he explained, “and it hit me: Wow! You could show this as a timeline. You could really, really explain it.” Adds Colón: “We’re in the business of clarification.”

The result is a timeline that spans the first 18 pages of the book, utilising a fold-out in the hardcover edition. Not only does it elucidate the events of September 11th, but, like the 9/11 Report, it focuses on the events leading up to it and the failure of governmental agencies to heed the warning signs. Jacobson, working as the author to Colón’s illustrations, took text almost exclusively from the commission’s report. Unlike the recent movies United 93 and World Trade Center, “it’s not a dramatization. It’s the story of an investigation,” Jacobson insists. “It’s graphic journalism.”

But many worry about whether or not the ‘graphic novel’–if not ‘comic book’–genre can support a topic as weighty as the 9/11 catastrophe. Tim Sumner, whose brother-in-law died in the World Trade Center, supports a new wave of “historical reference,” but has his doubts about the graphic adaptation. “While having not read the book,” he said, “it sounds pretty cheap.”

With concern for its appropriateness, no matter how much he supported the concept, publisher Thomas LeBien sent the book to the former officials of the 9/11 commision. The chair of the commission, New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean, admitted that he was “very concerned” when he first heard about the project. “But when I looked at it, it was absolutely accurate.” He and vice chairman Lee H. Hamilton even agreed to write a foreward for the graphic.

And both Colón and Jacobson exercised extreme consideration over what they chose to depict. Some of the images envision the violence aboard the planes, but when the text that reads “as time grew short and desperate, civilians leaped from North Tower upper floors” is left unillustrated. “It would have personally offended me to draw that. I just couldn’t,” Colón stated. “We knew this was not just politically charged but emotionally charged. We didn’t want to do anything that would offend anyone who lost someone.”

But the stigma of comic books may remain, however considerate the renderings, however factual the prose. The authors deeply pondered the effect of employing classic comic book onomatopoeias such as “Blam!” for explosions and “R-RUMBLE” for the collapse of the South Tower, and ultimately decided to use them. “Our feeling was that it would look like a silent movie without it,” Jacobson explained. “You have captions, you have balloons with text, you have sound effects,” Colón added. “Doing without any of that would make it not readable.”

Readability is the aim of The 9/11 Report: The Graphic Adaptation, and it seems an admirable goal. From the advent of widespread printing to our contemporary relationship with television, film, and the internet, we are increasingly evolving into a society of visual learners. There’s nothing wrong with a proclivity towards the visual, as long as the facts are not simplified or obscured. Kirkus’s early review notes especially that the book does not fall prey to this trap, calling it “thoughtful — and by no means dumbed-down.”

And an education of a large portion of the population that the original report could not reach speaks for the potential for the book’s positive impact. The book arrives in time to mark the 5th anniversary of the original attacks, and now is the time for everyone to learn the truth about the government’s handling of the situation, not the time to bicker over the medium in which it is reported. “There are going to be a whole bunch of kids, teenagers and adults that will not read the report,” Colón summed up, pointing to his new book as an alternative. “The educational system at large has resisted them, I think, because of the term ‘comic book.’ I like to think of them as something that has more purpose.”

Read articles at USAToday and The WashingtonPost; visit a blog discussion at Cake or Death.

The release of This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Merrick, has stirred up a great brouhaha in the writing and publishing industries. The ruckus is not entirely illogical, as Merrick recieved inspiration through her dismay with the state of the writing and publishing industries. The book, she explains, is the fruit of “years of being appalled, as a young writer, at how little promotion serious women writers get:”

You need review space, and review space is still very biased toward men and bylines at our literary publications. Look at Harper’s or The New Yorker. It’s a very good week if there are 25 percent or 30 percent female bylines.

As that was happening, serious books by women were edged further off the front display tables by these knockoffs of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and then it just got harder and harder to find literary works by women. I wanted to make a way for the audience of readers who want more literary work to be able to find it. And so that’s how this anthology was born.

The anthology, which contains stories by writers such as Aimee Bender, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gorden, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Francine Prose and Curtis Sittenfeld, is anything but anti-feminist, contrary the conclusions some might draw from the title. Instead, its aim is to focus on the issues that preoccupy those women who are trying to make serious contributions to the face of literature, whether they are “female” issues, “feminist” issues, or neither. Merrick advocates the ability for women to write about the female psyche without limiting it to the topics of finding Mr. Right and the right handbag to go with him.

“We don’t have just one story, we have many stories, and they’re not getting heard,” Merrick laments. “It’s essential that they be heard, because if we don’t hear them and we just hear that it’s all about marriage and designer shoes, then that diminishes us. It diminishes our imagination.” She’s tired of men cornering the market on ‘genius’ books, a problem she encountered when trying to find a publisher for her novel Girly, an epic exploring female sexuality and spirituality through seven different voices. She finally had to publish the book herself.

But there are a number of disagreements that have sprung up around the book’s publication. The first is, naturally, from authors and proponents of the chick lit genre itself, who feel that the anthology is persecuting one half of the female authorship body, creating factions precisely when it should be rallying the troops. Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, fumed, “We’ve got the country’s (self-proclaimed) best women writers turning up their noses at their fellow women authors’ more commercial efforts. The best chick-lit books deal with race and class, gender wars and workplace dynamics, not just shoes and shopping.”

And one could certainly argue that the publishing industry is kept alive through commercial best-sellers that entertain readers even if they don’t innovate literature. In retaliation, Lauren Baratz-Logsted is publishing an anthology titled This is Chick Lit. “The reason chick lit sells in such great abundance is that it provides readers with a reliable form of entertainment,” she said. “Is there something wrong with this?”

But from Merrick’s point of view, chick lit is taking up publishing resources and bookstore space that might otherwise be available to serious female writers. And it seems to me that a continued proliferation of chick lit, sometimes without regard to quality, combined with a male domination in the genre of serious literature, can intimidate aspiring female writers, conciously or unconsciously. In his article, Jeff Simon points out that “only a few of the stories in her declaration of commercial independence are formally challenging. Is that because she - the anthologist - is out of sympathy with that kind of story, or the best current female writers are?”

Merrick reveals that the bias is not her own: she is desperate to discover female authors tackling issues and style in controversial ways. “I would argue that those books are being written - and very possibly not published,” she states. “We all know what we do with the difficult Boy Books. These books win our awards. These are the books that generations of men are trying to (emulate) with their next generation of Boy Books. I think there are women writing these books but it’s happening as there is increasing pressue on women to write in a more realist mode.”

Visit a discussion of This is Not Chick Lit on Conversational Reading.

As long as we’re on the topic of the slow but inevitable digitisation of the known universe, let us take a moment to imagine the effect it has upon an author. Lionel Shriver, author of the 2005 Orange Prize Award-Winning We Need to Talk About Kevin, has a particular observation about the effect of the computerisation on the publishing industry. And no, it’s not the impact of composing on a laptop using the wireless in a coffee shop, or the future of book signings in a world of e-books.

Ms. Shriver (who changed her name from ‘Margaret Ann’ at the age of fifteen because she thought men had it easier in the world) would like to draw attention to deficiencies of computer graphics in creating cover art. She reminisces about her first couple of books, whose covers bore original art truly expressive of the stories contained inside. She goes on to explain the transformation of computer graphics:

Yet my latter covers have all capitulated to the computer. By the 1990s, designers were glued to their screens. If you scan Waterstone’s today, you will be hard pressed to find any covers employing original art. … For the most part, designers now just drag photos off the web, and play with backgrounds and fonts at the keyboard. That’s why a strange drabness, coldness, and sameness is plaguing the aesthetics of book publishing - and at a time when the pleasures of physical books, as opposed to electronic media, are vital to defend.

The neccessary relationship between the work of art inside and the work of art outside is maligned when one is the product of human being’s most visceral creative powers, and the other looks a bit, perhaps, airbrushed. Flaws and irregularities, Shriver contends, lend objects the mystery that we recognise as beauty.

She takes care to point out that she’s “not one to complain about the advent of the computer overall, which has made writing so much more convenient.” She’s simply frustrated because the last thirteen covers for her new book that her publisher has suggested have not worked, and no one appears to be heeding her requests for original art. That’s why, she explains, “at my wit’s end this last weekend, I…hauled out my coloured pencils. I drew my own damn book cover - luminous, one-of-a-kind, and…not quite perfect. We’ll see if my publisher bites. Call me a Luddite if you will - at least I tried.”

Read her full article in the Guardian, entitled ‘Now that pixels have replaced pencils the art of drawing has vanished. I’m so exasperated I’m designing my own book cover’ here, or read interviews and a biography at HarperCollins.