As David Smith wrote in a recent article in The Observer, "The first question AN Wilson is likely to face at literary festivals
for a while will be: ‘How did you fall for it?’"
That’s because Wilson is the recent victim of a hoax letter. A hoax letter that he published in his biography of poet Sir John Betjeman. A hoax letter sent to him by a fellow Betjeman biographer that spells out the following in code: "AN Wilson is a shit."
The Sunday Times was the first to spot the hoax. So how will Wilson’s publisher handle the mess? Says the UK house:
"We won’t be stopping publication of the book, but when we reprint it,
we will take the letter out," said Emma Mitchell, a publicist for
publisher Hutchinson. "We’re not panicking about it"
Wilson’s US publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is taking a different approach. From a story in Publisher’s Weekly Daily:
…FSG’s plans to bring out Betjeman: A Life in the U.S. in
December were thwarted by the bogus document; when the scandal broke,
the house already had brought in finished books from the U.K. to sell
in the U.S., which contained the fraudulent letter as well as incorrect
information regarding it. The solution, according to FSG senior v-p of
marketing and publicity Jeff Seroy, was to include an erratum note from
Wilson in all 10,000 copies of the book’s first editions, and to
correct the text (and omit Hillier’s made-up document) in all future
editions…
In his erratum note, Wilson comes across as a good sport, explaining
how he received the letter and his hindsight view: "I should have smelt
a rat when I wrote back to ‘Eve de Harben,’ an anagram of ‘Ever been
had?’" Keeping a stiff upper lip, Wilson ends with the declaration that
the "scurrilous forgery will be removed in any future reprints."
