Geek On The Mountain

Milenka has a set of CS Lewis’s Narnia Books that are quite old. It looks like they’re a 1979 printing from Great Britian. She no doubt got them off eBay at some point or another. I happened across the copyright page of one of these puppies and I found this notice at the bottom of the page:

Except in the United States Of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

That’s kind of crazy. That says that you can’t sell or even give away the book if it has a cover that differs at all from the original. I’ve seen books that give a warning that if you bought the book with the cover torn off then you should know that it was reported to the publisher as being destroyed and they don’t get any money for it. (Even this site has such a notice) I’m guessing the above is some sort of an attempt at enforcing that. It says “except in the united states” because our copyright law specificially states that the publisher looses control of a copy once it’s sold. You’re free to sell or rent or do w/e with the copy (the key being as long as you aren’t making more copies..) and the copyright holder can have no say in the matter. This is generally known as the Right of First Sale. There are some exceptions, but not for anything as simple as books. It seems rather sill that, if the cover got torn off a book, I wouldn’t even be able to give the dumb thing away. I’m left wondering if this notice still appears in books outside of the US today…

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