OK, now that we’ve got the semi-obligatory mean swipe (we are a blog, after all) at the New York Times Book Review out of the way, damn, I can’t believe I missed out on Ben Schott‘s alleged plagiarism of an Anne Fadiman essay in his back-page ruminations on mistreating books. I like to tell myself that the only reason I didn’t spot it, being one of Anne Fadiman’s fan, is that I didn’t bother to read Schott’s article until after several readers forced Times editors to re-examine the piece, including the similarites between his claim that a hotel chambermaid berated him for putting a book down with the spine cracked open and the opening of her essay, in which her brother receives a note from a hotel chambermaid berating him for putting a book down with the spine cracked open.
According to the corrective note in yesterday’s paper, “Schott… said that he had never read Fadiman’s essay before it was brought to his attention, also by a reader of the Book Review, and suggested that the thematic resemblances were a coincidental result of the narrowness of the topic. He maintains that the encounter with the Italian chambermaid took place as he described it, in 1989, when he was 15.” No other explanation for how his experience so neatly mirrors the 1964 incident Fadiman describes is proffered. But, funnily enough, the book in which her recollection appears contains another essay, this time on plagiarism, called “Nothing New Under the Sun.”