If you haven't already heard, someone is accusing Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, and possibly J.K. Rowling of plagiarizing large portions of another author's work into Book 4 of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. The accuser, Paul Allen, is the estate trustee for Adrian Jacobs, author of Willy the Wizard. I hadn't ever heard of that book either, so I googled it.
Turns out Willy was published in 1987 and is about a wizard who goes to college and goes all waning nostalgic on his readers to tell about his antics as a young wizard. If you want, you can go online to the website that was conveniently set up last October to read some carefully chosen excerpts from the book, which apparently only amounts to about thirty-six pages.
Adrian Jacobs was an English lawyer and stock broker who made his fortune in the market and then lost it after he forgot to take his own advice and invest wisely, dying penniless. His bio however, says that he was unable to manage his money after he suffered from a stroke. Interesting. His bio also says that his son, Joseph, lives in America and already tried making this claim in 2004, so I'm not even sure how Paul Allen fits into the puzzle. Coincidentally, Jacobs still had his fortune when the book was published, (after having already been rejected by Bloomsbury) which I'm going to go ahead and read as, "self funded publishing." Seriously, go read an excerpt, it's bad. It's not even creatively bad. We aren't even talking bad like a certain vampire series everyone keeps insisting on comparing to HP, where the writing is so poor you can hardly stand it but something about the story manages to suck you in like a leech and hold onto you until the end when you're finally able to come up for air and you realize that you have just wasted a weekend of your life reading four books about a whiny, insecure girl and her controlling, insecure boyfriend and the sketchy love triangle between them and an only slightly less obnoxious immature skater/bad ass wannabe that is only resolved through alien procreation and border line incest...
I digress.
The important thing to note is that Jacobs was rejected by Bloomsbury and J.K.R.'s agent, this is where the shady/patchy/ridiculous claim comes in. Allen is claiming that Bloomsbury and said agent kept Willy in a dark closet, only to bring him out again and throw him onto J.K.R. and her book. Apparently the underwater task from Book 4 is too similar to something Willy did in one of his adventures. Apparently only Adrian Jacobs can imagine clues and mer people. Huh.
You know, when I was in seventh grade, I got into this huge argument with this girl over a saying that my friends and I had coined back in the fifth or sixth grade. I heard her using it one day and I said, "Hey, that's our phrase, you can't take it!" She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Um, I totally made that up back in elementary school, like forever ago." To which I replied, "You did not, I made it up at Louise Archer!" We carried on for the longest time over who actually had invented whatever catchphrase was the thing at the time. I felt truly slighted because she wouldn't stop using my expression and she was also taking credit for it whenever someone complimented her on it. Of course, she gave me the same beady, squinty, hateful eyes every time I told someone, "Thank you, I made that up!" It wasn't until years later, when I learned about Darwin, and how he actually wasn't the only person to come up with the theory of evolution, (and I think not even the first person to publish it) but how he's the name we remember, that I understood just how easy it is to simultaneously create an idea. Huh.
Allen's claim is a stretch at the very most. It's also a very obvious Harry-Potter-books-are-still-selling-like-hotcakes-and-I-don't-want-to-have-to-actually-do-anything-to-make-money scheme. Please, J.K.R. has talked, I don't know how many times, about how the whole series was planned out on napkins and scraps of paper for years before she ever received a book deal. The plot points Paul Allen is trying to argue as plagiarized are key elements to Book 4, not something that J.K.R. could have easily written into her story line based on a recommendation from her publisher. Besides, if this whole claim was already kiboshed in 2004, why is it springing up again now? Don't tell me Allen was waiting to purchase the web domain name to make his plea more public and therefore more effective. That must be it. He must have been waiting for the deal to go through and transfer WillytheWizard.com over to a children's book instead of whatever shady industry it may have catered to before...
Whew! Glad we cleared that up!
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