The NYT has gone on record to say it “regrets publishing” a recent essay, “Confessions of a Book Abuser”, by Ben Schott due to “certain resemblances to passages in someone else’s essay”. That is the gentle way to say plagiarism.
That someone else is Anne Fadiman whose essay “Never Do That to a Book” appeared in her 1998 book and soon to be bestseller “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”.
I had read Schott’s essay when it came out and had begun a post on it titled “Sir, that is no way to treat a book!” which is one of the the opening lines of the essay and apparently is also one of the red plagiarism flags.
Fadiman’s line was “Sir, you must never do that to a book”
I was still working on the post when this story broke. Joyce at Bibliophile Bullpen has it right when she says that no one should be surprised if you are at all familiar with Schott’s previous work. His cannon is all about other peoples work. Compendiums of information. Publisher Weekly calls Schott the “London miscellanist”.
Schott claims that the similarities are a “coincidental result of the narrowness of the topic”
The New York Times claims that “had editors been aware of Fadiman’s essay, the Book Review would not have published Schott’s”