The Observer
09.01.22 47Los Angeles Times
‘Part of the game’“Th e case raises the question
of whether the result will
serve as object lessons for
investors confronted with
cheery promises in the
future. Bet that the answer
is ‘no.’ High-tech investing
is predisposed to take even
hyperbolic projections as part
of the game.” Michael HiltzikThe Irish Times
‘Cartoonish notions’“Just as Silicon Valley is a
cartoonish version of US
notions about the virtues
of hard work and getting
rich quick, so Holmes was a
heightened version of Silicon
Valley. As her self-improvement
scheme made clear, she was
trying to turn herself into a
machine that had no time foranything but work. Th is was
not for her own benefi t, of
course, but humanity’s. She
perfectly encapsulated the
Silicon Valley credo that tech
was here to serve us, and
never mind exactly how it did
it, the billions it was making or
whether it even worked... Th e
real secret, of course, was that
Th eranos didn’t have any trade
secrets because its machines
didn’t work.” David StreitfeldNew York Times
‘Blur of dots’“Th e line between the
visionary and the fraudster
can be less a bright slash than
a blur of dots. If Ms. Holmes’s
team had had a breakthrough
before Th eranos’s technology
was rolled out... and her
devices worked, would anyone
have cared about the lies?”
Bethany McLeanSydney Morning Herald
‘Captured the zeitgeist’“But even if Holmes has to
spend some time behind bars,
one suspects that things will
work out for her. Fairly or not,
she’s captured a corner of
the zeitgeist, and is likely to
retain a degree of celebrity- or perhaps notoriety — for
years to come.”
Stephen L Carter
The world’s The downfall of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos
view on...
For want of a motive for
the book thief, let’s run
through some possibilities
Filippo Bernardini is
accused of stealing
manuscripts. For money
or just a good read?
The theft of books
occupies a complex place in our
moral judgment, depending on
motive. In Markus Zusak ’s 2005
novel The Book Thief, the actions of
the title character are heroic – she
steals books to save them from
destruction. During the 2011 London
riots, it was frequently observed, with
a hint of reproach, that the looters
pointedly left bookshops untouched
and this deliberate spurning was
seen as further indictment of the
mob’s character, as if we’d have
thought better of the rioters if they
had heaved a bollard through the
window of Waterstones and made off
with the latest Jeanette Winterson.
In the run-up to publication of the
fi nal Harry Potter novel in 2007, the
publisher laid on extra security at the
printworks after it was claimed that
tabloid reporters were hanging about
offering cash bribes to any worker
willing to slip them a sneak preview.
In this instance, the opprobrium was
not because such a theft might have
deprived the publisher and author of
income, but because only a sociopath
would deliberately ruin the ending
for millions of children.
But motive is the one unknown
quantity in last week’s story about
book theft , in which a fi ve-year-long
mystery appeared to be resolved
when the FBI arrested Filippo
Bernardini , an employee in the rights
department at Simon & Schuster UK,
on suspicion of stealing hundreds of
unpublished digital manuscripts.
The sustained scam seems to
have been relatively sophisticated
on one level; his knowledge of the
industry allowed him to impersonate
senior publishing fi gures online, his
familiarity with names and jargon
meant his phishing emails rang noalarm bells with their recipients
and he registered more than 160
domain names from which to send
his messages. But on another level,
the operation was comically crude:
his fake email addresses contained
deliberate misspellings such as “@
penguinrandornhouse” instead of
“randomhouse”, yet for fi ve years
publishers, agents and authors were
duped into sending digital copies of
new books into the ether.
Bernardini’s alleged crimes
are the more intriguing precisely
because so far he doesn’t appear to
have profi ted from them. None of
the stolen books, which included big
hitters such as Margaret Atwood,
Stieg Larsson and Sally Rooney as
well as unknown debut authors,
was leaked online and no ransom or
blackmail demands were ever made.
It seemed the thief was not stealing
the books either to liberate the texts
or to cash in. Why, then?
Before Bernardini’s arrest, it was
widely suspected that the culprit
was a literary scout, engaging in
industrial espionage. A scout’s
currency is advance information:
a heads-up on the next big thing
can give their clients the edge
when it comes to bidding wars on
foreign or screen rights. My fi rst
job after university, 25 years ago,
was working for a literary scout, the
celebrated Anne-Louise Fisher, and
I quickly learned that scouting is a
highly refi ned art, built on powers
of persuasion, mutual respect
and trust established over years,
an instinct for the market and the
ability to speed-read. It also involved
a tremendous number of lunches,
but never anything so underhand as
deception.
In those analogue days, of course,
thefts such as Bernardini’s would
have been impossible, unless you
were prepared to mug a courier.
Unoffi cial advance copies of hot new
books crossed London in the form
of typescripts, great breezeblocks of
A4 paper bound with elastic bands in
unmarked Jiffy bags, passed under
tables at meetings, with both sender
and recipient sworn to secrecy.
Often, especially before the
London or Frankfurt book fairs,
I would lug home a 400-page
manuscript to prepare a reader’s
report by the next morning, living
in mortal terror of leaving it on the
tube or in the pub. If details of a
closely guarded novel had escaped
back then, it would have been aneasy matter to trace the leak to its
source. But I still remember vividly
the thrill of turning over that fi rst
sheet, knowing that I was one of the
fi rst people in the world to dive into
a book that would go on to be huge.Perhaps the thief’s initial
motive was no more sinister than
this: he was hungry for a new story.
But the longer the scam continued,
the more it appears to have become
a power game, with the scammer
taking pleasure in manipulating
some of the most senior fi gures in
publishing and later turning abusive
when his efforts were met with
suspicion. That’s the interpretation
offered by Daniel Sandström ,
a Swedish publisher who was
repeatedly targeted by the book
thief. “[I]f the game is psychological,
a kind of mastery or superiority, it’s
easier to visualise,” he told Vulture
last year. “This is a business full
of resentment as well, and in that
sense, it becomes a good story.”
It is a good story and maybe we’re
fascinated by instances of literary
fraud precisely because publishing
is still widely regarded as a business
grounded in trust, relationships
and old-fashioned courtesy. I’m
thinking of Can You Ever Forgive
Me? or the curious case of author AJ
Finn , the pen name of former editor
Dan Mallory , who allegedly spent
years creating a fi ctitious biography
for himself within the publishing
world. The idea of someone abusing
that assumption of decency for
their own advantage seems more
shocking in this context than it
might in, say, the world of fi nance
or arms dealing.
I fi nd myself hoping that
Bernardini’s motive won’t be
anything as banal as money. Ideally,
he’ll turn out to be a rejected author
seeking revenge or looking for a
novel he can fi llet and pass off as
his own, like the protagonist of Jean
Hanff Korelitz ’s The Plot. That’s
what I’d go for if I were writing the
inevitable fi lm adaptation. In fact, I
might suggest to my agent that he
pitch the idea to a few production
companies. I’ll remind him to check
the spelling of their emails very, very
carefully, though. Illustration
by Dominic
McKenzieStephanie
Merritt