Monday, March 12, 2007

My first citation

In doing some acquisitions work today, I opened up a box of books from France. I always glance through the titles first to see whether any of the books look interesting. Anges et démons: Autopsie d'une mystification caught my eye, though I assumed it would just be a book about, you know, angels and demons. But it turns out that it was actually on my old albatross, Angels and Demons.

As I flipped through the book, it quickly became apparent that Anges et démons was basically a book-length version of my blog post. Lots of new material, but also a fair amount that could have been taken directly from my blog and translated into French. The material on how bad Brown's geography of Rome is sounded particularly familiar.

At this point I was pretty certain that Jean-Michel Oullion, the author of the book, had seen my blog. "Is this plagiarism?" I've never even thought of the possibility of anyone plagiarizing my work... let's try to get people to read it first, Danny.

So you can imagine my relief when I came across the final item in the bibliography:

Sur le blog de Danny Loss, nos lecteurs anglophones trouveront également un mini-forum de discussion sur les erreurs d'Anges et Démons.


I still think Oullion could have made clearer the extent to which he relied on my work. But for the time being, I'm pleased as punch.