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Bill Hillman's
Bill Hillman's ERBzin-e Weekly Online Fanzine
Volume 760
and
ERB C.H.A.S.E.R ENCYCLOPEDIA
ERB C.H.A.S.E.R.
A Collector's Hypertexted and Annotated Storehouse of Encyclopedic Resources
by an Exhausted Scholar
William G. Hillman
Presents

John Coleman Burroughs: Lad and the Lion - 5 b/w interiors

THE LAD AND THE LION
Working title: "Men and Beasts" begun in February 1914 ~ 20,000 added words for 1938 hardcover release


PUBLISHING HISTORY (USA)

PULP
All-Story Weekly: June 30 & July 7, 14, 1917
    Modest Stein cover with blurb: "On the screen/Selig Polyscope Co." ~ no interiors
FIRST EDITION
ERB Inc.: February 15, 1938 ~ 317 pages
    John Coleman Burroughs dust jacket and five B/W interiors
ERB Inc."printer's dummy" April 23, 1940
REPRINT EDITIONS
Grosset & Dunlap: 1939
    John Coleman Burroughs dust jacket and no interiors
Canaveral Press: April 28, 1964 ~ 317 pages
    John Coleman Burroughs dust jacket and five B/W interiors
Ballantine paperback: September 1964 ~ 192 pages
    R. Bartram cover art
Ace paperback: April 1974 ~ 189 pages
    Enrich cover art
 
For detailed information see:Robert Zeuschner's
ERB: The Exhaustive Scholar’s and Collector’s Descriptive Bibliography
Dial 1-800-253-2187 to order a copy from McFarland for $46.50

COVER GALLERY

All-Story Weekly - June 30, 1917 - The Lad and the Lion 1/3
See ERB's First Film ~ ERBzin-e 450

Canaveral edition: John Coleman Burroughs cover art
Ballantine edition: R. Bartram cover artAce edition: Enrich cover art


JOHN COLEMAN BURROUGHS INTERIOR ART


Frontispiece: The lad, the lion, and the girl
Scarce a stride had he taken before the beast was upon himHalf a dozen Arabs were firing upon ill-favored tribesmen- John Coleman BurroughsDragged him down as a beast of prey drags down its quarryBehind him, stealthy and sinuous, moved his great mate - John Coleman Burroughs


RELATED FRONT PAGE STORY IN THE NATIONAL POST 
My recent e-mail to the editors of the National Post, Canada's national newspaper, has dragged my observations on the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs into a dispute that has been making international headlines.

Numerous follow-up phone calls from Toronto with requests for book cover illustrations and for more info on ERB's stories resulted in a front page story in the Saturday, November 9th edition of the  Post: The headline:

"Boy and beast on a boat? Oldest idea in the world"

is accompanied by a colour reproduction of John Coleman Burroughs' dust jacket painting for THE LAD AND THE LION lifted from our ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. Online Encyclopedia.
The story also went on to quote George McWhorter of the University of Louisville and authorities on literature and copyright.
Unfortunately they didn't get the name of our university quite right : -)

Boy and beast on a boat?
Oldest idea in the world

Sarah Schmidt ~ National Post
Saturday, November 09, 2002
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id={3A7EE136-A2F5-4457-A00C-AAB6A90F67FB}

"It appears the plot of a boy on a boat
with a beast is nearly a century old."

Fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs are shaking their heads at Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's accusation this week that Montreal's Yann Martel stole the premise from him.

Burroughs, the famed creator of Tarzan, told a similar story in his The Lad and the Lion in 1914.

Inspired by archetypal religious imagery of people cast adrift with animals, most notably in the tale of Noah's Ark, and the literary tradition of the special bond between child and beast, as in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, Burroughs devoted a long chapter of his book to the boy and the lion drifting for years aboard a derelict boat.

Mr. Scliar's novel Max and the Cats, the story of a Jewish boy and a panther on a lifeboat, was published in 1981.

Mr. Martel's Life of Pi, the story of an Indian boy and a tiger on a lifeboat, has won this year's Booker Prize.

Mr. Scliar this week accused Mr. Martel of abusing his "intellectual property." He mused about taking legal action but then decided against it.

Besides The Lad and the Lion, Burroughs also wrote of a man-animal maritime adventure in his 1914 novel The Beasts of Tarzan. In this story, Tarzan, stranded on an island, survives with the help of a panther and an ape before the group escapes on a boat.

"It's ridiculous to say you can copyright ideas in literature. What hasn't been said? What hasn't been recycled?" said Bill Hillman, a professor of education at the University of Brandon and a Burroughs expert."Certainly Burroughs came up with just about any combination you could think of with man and beast."

Burroughs, author of more than 20 Tarzan novels, always maintained that the concept of an original literary idea defied logic.

"Burroughs himself said that there's nothing new under the sun and the best we can to is put new clothes on old ideas," said George McWhorter, curator of the Burroughs Memorial Collection at the University of Louisville.

His own blunt admission did not stop the accusations of  plagiarism levelled against Burroughs, whose Tarzan books have been translated into more than 50 languages,  have sold more than 20 million copies and have served as the basis for many movies.

Some of his contemporaries accused him of  "stealing from Romulus and Kipling,'' Dr. McWhorter said.

"I guess we should also accuse Kipling of copying Romulus,"  Dr. McWhorter added mockingly.

Mowgli, Kipling's central character in The Jungle Book,  written in 1894, was raised in the wild by wolves, just like the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who myth says were abandoned as infants and saved by a female wolf.

Marcus Boon, a professor of contemporary literature at  York University in Toronto, said the spiral of accusations illustrates the absurdity of laying claim to an original idea in literature.

"These are sort of fundamental images and narratives  within human culture," Dr. Boon said of the image of a person cast adrift with animals.

Dr. Boon said examples of the "ubiquity of the man-animals-raft image" in literature and film include French author Alfred Jarry's Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll,  Pataphysician (1898). The story ends with the main character sailing away in a boat with a chattering ape.

Werner Herzog's 1972 classic movie Aguirre:  Wrath of God, which tells the story of a 16th-century expedition in Latin America, ends with the main character on a boat with monkeys.

As is common in the literary world, Mr. Martel disclosed long ago that he was inspired by Mr. Scliar's plot in Max and the Cats, translated into English in 1990.  "Books are constantly referencing other books," Dr. Boon said. "I'm sure Scliar's book has resonance with other books."

Carys Craig, a copyright specialist at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, said the law accepts this long-standing practice.

"It's essential that people be free to develop upon  and free to share ideas -- and that's a goal of copyright law....

* * *

For the rest of the story see:    http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id={3A7EE136-A2F5-4457-A00C-AAB6A90F67FB}


THE FRONTPAGE STORY GENERATED BY OUR ERB PROMOTION
PROMPTED THIS FOLLOW-UP STORY IN THE OTTAWA CITIZEN AND NATIONAL POST

Catch a tiger by the tale
Boys and beasts were storied long before the latest literary dust-up

http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/story.asp?id={FBA658CF-888D-4406-B654-3244DB9A1E65}
Paul Gessell
The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, November 12, 2002

References
Bill Hillman's Illustrated ERB Bibliography
ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. Online Encyclopedia
Hillman ERB Cosmos
Patrick Ewing's First Edition Determinors
John Coleman Burroughs Tribute
J. Allen St. John Bio, Gallery & Links
Edgar Rice Burroughs: LifeLine Biography
Bob Zeuschner's ERB Bibliography
J.G. Huckenpohler's ERB Checklist
Burroughs Bibliophiles Bulletin
ERB Illustrated Pulp Bibliography
Novel Summary by David Adams
G. T. McWhorter's Burroughs Bulletin Index
Bruce Wood's ERB Jacket Store
Ed Stephan's Tarzan of the Internet
Nick Knowles' ERB Paperback Collector
Illustrated Bibliography of ERB Pulp Magazines
Phil Normand's Recoverings
ERBzin-e Weekly Online Fanzine
ERB Emporium: Collectibles ~ Comics ~ BLBs ~ Pulps ~ Cards
ERBVILLE: ERB Public Domain Stories in PDF
Irwin Porges: ERB: The Man Who Created Tarzan
Clark A. Brady's Burroughs Cyclopedia
Heins' Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs
Bradford M. Day's Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Bibliography


Related ERBzin-e References
ERB's First Film
Nkima Chattering from the Shoulder: Lad and the Lion I
Nkima Chattering from the Shoulder: Lad and the Lion II
ERB Emporium: Collectibles ~ Comics ~ BLBs ~ Pulps ~ Cards
Screen Heroines
ERB of the Silver Screen

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