The forthcoming Encyclopedia is intended by J. K. Rowling to be the authoritative directory of all creatures, persons,  places, and things that make up the Harry Potter universe. Rowling has been working on it on and off for years, and every so often a snippet of activity sends the crowd into a mad frenzy over its supposed “impending” release. As long ago as April 2008, Rowling stated that she had begun work on the project in earnest. In September 2009 we were treated to a comment from fellow novelist Ian Rankin that Rowling “had been making family trees of all her characters,” only to learn from her publisher the following week that “the encyclopedia simply remains something Ms. Rowling would like to complete sometime in the future.”

In recent interviews, Rowling has unequivocally stated that she still intends to write the encyclopedia, but has been vague when pressed for details on the timing of its release. Rowling euphemistically refers to the Encyclopedia as “The Scottish Book,” an oblique reference to Macbeth, which as every theater-goer knows is only to be called “The Scottish Play” — and nothing else — unless the speaker wishes to invoke the curse of Macbeth. Among the many tragedies attributed to the curse, in 1672 the actor playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the blunted stage one and killed Duncan in full view of the audience. During a performance in New York in 1849, a riot broke out in which 31 people were trampled to death. In 1937, during Laurence Olivier’s first portrayal of Macbeth, his sword shattered and flew into the audience, striking a patron who immediately suffered a heart attack.

Given the superstitious tendencies of a writer whose chief villain is known only as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Rowling’s enigmatic reference is perhaps unsurprising, but no public hue and cry has been heard in connection with Harry Potter that can even remotely compare to Macbeth’s ill-fated fortunes. Perhaps Rowling fears that the breadth of detail envisioned by the Encyclopedia — which is rumored to include such diverse subjects as directions for splitting one’s soul into a Horcrux, how Lord Voldemort obtained a new body, and the backstory to Florean Fortescue’s murder — will give rise to a curse of its own.

Of course, while all of this is superficially interesting if you are a Harry Potter fan, from an intellectual property standpoint it would be decidedly ho-hum but for the fact that Rowling filed suit against a fan-created online encyclopedia called the Harry Potter Lexicon.  Originally the brain-child of librarian Steve Vander Ark, the Lexicon – as one would expect from something called a lexicon — lists characters, places, creatures, spells, potions and magical devices, as well as analyzing magical theory and other details of the series. Famed for publishing one of the first timelines of events occurring in the Harry Potter universe, the Lexicon has been used as a reference source by Rowling herself, who admits that:

This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an internet café while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing).

Notwithstanding her purported admiration for it, when RDR Books proposed to publish a print version the Lexicon, Rowling filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in New York District Court seeking to enjoin its publication.  Although the court recognized that authors do not have the right to stop the publication of reference guides and companion books about literary works, it nonetheless found that Vander Ark had exceeded the ambiguous boundary of “fair use” and ruled against the Lexicon and its valiant cohort of defenders. The upshot of the legal battle was that a less-than-comprehensive (and therefore less-than-exciting) version of the Lexicon was vetted and permitted to be published under the disingenuous title The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction.

Personally, I prefer the aptly-named Complete Idiot’s Guide to The World of Harry Potter, which suffers only from the fact that it attempts to be a scholarly work rather than the tongue in cheek farce that I would like to read and hope to find in an alternate universe. Perhaps if Ashton Kutcher ever gets around to making a sequel to The Butterly Effect, I’ll be able to find the version I’m really interested in.

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One of the quirks of copyright law is that book titles cannot be copyrighted, with an exception if you write a series like Harry Potter and the Copyrighted Sequels. So every cool or amusing title you ever came across while browsing through the bookstore is up for grabs and subject to re-use, and — unlike top domain name owners — being the proud owner of a book title means that you have actually written a book (and not just reserved www.greatwriter.com so that you can flip it for a quick buck later). That being the case, in my altruistic desire to see more people write (good) books, allow me to offer you some of the gems I have stumbled across in my not-too-short lifetime — with the caveat that these are titles you probably don’t actually want to use again.

(1) I Killed Hemingway, in which Pappy Markham writes a tell-all about how Hem stole all his great ideas and thus had to pay the ultimate price. Actually quite good.

(2) The Roaches Have No King, a fantastic novel about a love affair between Ira Fishblatt and his various women, including the overweight, matronly Ruth Grubstein. Told from the perspective of the cockroaches living in his apartment, including one named Rosa Luxemburg.

(3) God Hates Us All. This is of, course, the title of the fictional bestseller written by Hank Moody (cf. David Duchovny) in Californication, which is arguably the best Showtime series ever. (Yes, I said “ever’). When I heard/saw/found out about the name of the book during the first season, I literally wept with despair that the title had been stolen from the available lexicon, even fictionally. And then they went and actually ghostwrote it, and it lost a bit of pizazz for me. Because the tie-in book is just not that good. Fluff, really.

(4) Print the Legend. Another awesome (and newly released) book about the imagined death of Hemingway, by Craig McDonald, who I’d never heard of before I found this gem at my erstwhile local bookstore, Rakestraw Books. I admit this is not the most awesome title in the history of novels, but the cover is really cool, so it gets the “value added” award. And it was really good. Even if you don’t like Hemingway (and think Martha should have blown his head off years before) it was really good.

(5) One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fantastic book. Fantastic title. Better in Spanish in both respects, really, as Cien años de soledad rolls off the tongue almost effortlessly and if you can read castellano then you know how good Márquez really is.

(6) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A classic, but frankly not one of my favorites, as his writing is muddled and very Zen-like. I don’t enjoy having to intuit what writers mean — I prefer to follow along mindlessly absorbing limpid prose until 3:00 a.m., when I only reluctantly put the book down so I won’t ruin it by speed-reading the last 50 pages. Pirsig’s next book, Lila, which was published after a 17 year hiatus, is actually a much better read, and truly affecting. Best line in the book: “Take care of the goodness inside you.”

(7) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, and Still Life With Woodpecker. The magnificent trio of Tom Robbins’ novels from my decadent youth. Whose titles don’t merit copyright protection because they are not part of a series in any sense of the word recognized by the intelligentsia at the Copyright Office.

(8) A Confederacy of Dunces. A posthumous masterpiece about big, fat Ignatius Reilly and his love of the round file, among other things. Toole was a Swift scholar, and his protagonist has been compared to Pantagruel, but readers who aren’t charmed or amused by a fat, flatulent, gluttonous, loud, lying, hypocritical, self-deceiving, self-centered blowhard who masturbates to memories of a dog and pretends to profundity are not likely to enjoy this one.

(9) Ham on Rye. Okay, I admit it. I’m cheating here, but only because this was one of my all time favorites when I was in my 20s, and I ended up doing some legal work for Bukowski’s old printing house (Black Sparrow Press). The book design, with the soft cardboard covers and bold graphics, was a real winner at the time, though sadly the jacket does not stand the test of time. My copy is now sun faded and beat, but I still love it like a toddler loves his teddy. Bukowski’s infinitely better-titled book is The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, which suffers from being poetry, but being Bukowski is eminently readable, and includes a few cowboy poems even a city slicker could love. And if you are prejudiced against Bukowski because you had that bad Mickey Rourke movie inflicted on you at some point in your life, pick up a copy of Pulp and read it when you’re decompressing from the mogul runs this winter. Who knew Bukowski could do Philip Marlowe?

(10) Last, but not least, Trouble Is My Business or, alternatively, The Simple Art of Murder, by the king of noir, Raymond Chandler. Nobody does it better, and his whodunits all have titles to kill for.

(11) And finally, to fulfill my obligation to prove that lawyers are not mathematicians, number 11 in this top 10 has to go to my uncle John Paxton’s screenplay for the 1944 thriller Murder, My Sweet, which is still delightful. Kids these days are missing out on the whole black and white thing.

(12) Last one, I swear. That other Raymond, Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Va bene?

And that’s it, I’m Audi 5000 (as Evan Dando used to say). And no, you can’t copyright that either.

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For example, the idea of a wizardry contest at a school of wizardry does not exactly break new ground in the realm of fantasy — one has only to turn to LeGuin’s classic A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) to follow the adventures of Ged at the school for wizards on the Isle of Roke. And one can easily step out of our world and into the Land by merely cracking open Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), where Thomas Covenant awakes to find himself in a magical world-within-our-world and wields wild magic that makes the Council of Lords at Revelstone uneasy. (Revelstone, of course,  is a wizard’s college, among other things). And our inquiry needn’t end there, since there are innumerable books where the notion of formal training for magicians is a key element (see, e.g., Magician (1982)), and scores more where the idea of a wizard’s apprenticeship is mentioned in passing.

Willy’s claim that the concept of a young boy learning about magic and the secrets of the universe can be protected is patently ridiculous. You can’t copyright ideas, and the young-hero-coming-of-age story, with or without the magical extras thrown in, is no more copyrightable than the tired theme of the penny romance, where the poor heroine is swept off her feet by the dark, mysterious stranger who turns out to be a wealthy prince in disguise.  The coming-of-age plus magic combination is so old it hardly bears mention, ranging from Mallory’s retelling of the tale of the rise and fall of King Arthur in Le Morte d’Artur –first published in 1485 —  to so many iterations on the same or similar theme that they are beyond counting. Without even trying I can think of a handful of books with a similar theme — T.H. White’s The Sword and the Stone (1938); Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence (1965); Lloyd Alexander’s seminal work The Chronicles of Prydain (1964); and C.S. Lewis’ famous The Chronicles of Narnia (1950). In all of them the subject of children finding their way through a magical realm, or finding magic in what they thought was a quite ordinary realm, is central to the (uncopyrightable) theme.

In the final analysis, without parsing any more works of fantasy or dredging up further examples from my misspent youth, my view is that Willy the Wizard’s complaint is weak. If it ends up before a judge who happens to know his fantasy fiction and has a good grasp of mythology, I think poor Willy might be headed for the dungeon.

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At this point in the litigation the parties still are engaged in mudslinging, with Bloomsbury issuing statements claiming that Willy the Wizard was a “very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution” and was of a “very poor quality,”  and partisans on Willy‘s side saying all the nasty things you would expect about J.K. Rowling. I confess to not having read Willy the Wizard, nor engaged in a line-by-line comparison of the sections which are claimed to have been purloined, so I cannot opine with any personal authority about the quality of the claims being made — although I do find it difficult to believe that J.K. Rowling’s expansive universe of characters had its specific genesis in this slight tome. (Perhaps that merely reflects my respect for J.K. Rowling’s achievement in helping my children learn to read, and the pleasure I have taken in reading along with them).  As I said, fame paints a target on your back for the hungry pack. To date, Harry Potter has beaten back all those who claimed to be his progenitors. You will, of course, recall that in 2002 at the height of the Harry Potter frenzy (when every 10-year-old in America seemed to be reading the new Potter book),  Rowling successfully defended herself against a plagiarism claim made by children’s author Nancy Stouffer. Perhaps Willy will end up getting sanctioned just as Stouffer did for making up a false claim. We’ll have to wait and see if the truth will out, or remain forever lost in the shadows of Hogwarts and the Forbidden Forest.

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Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Robert Scott Lawrence