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An Odd New Disclaimer: What Does it Mean?

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 80, Spring 1999 The C.S. Lewis Foundation for Truth in Publishing

IN 1998 ULSTERMAN David Bleakley published a book titled C. S. Lewis: at Home in Ireland, with a foreword by Walter Hooper. Bleakley includes a letter written by Lewis on 27 December 1955, and accompanies it with this notice: “Copyright (C) 1998 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Limited, London.”

Walter Hooper’s foreword is also copyrighted by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd., but it bears a special disclaimer that made James O’Fee curious, and so he inquired about it.

Dear Mrs Stevens,

Walter Hooper wrote the Foreword to David Bleakley’s book ‘C. S. Lewis: at Home in Ireland’, published 29 November 1998. With the Foreword appears this disclaimer- ‘Foreword by Walter Hooper. Copyright (C) 1998 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. The opinions and views expressed by Walter Hooper are his own and do not necessarily express the viewpoints or position of C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.’

Some questions-

a) Is this the first time that a disclaimer has been published in this form?

b) Does the principle apply only to Forewords written by Walter Hooper, only to Walter Hooper’s work, or to all material written by all employees of C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.?

c) If the written words of employees of C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd do not necessarily express the ‘viewpoints or position of C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.’, how does one establish what the ‘viewpoints and position’ of C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. really are?

No answer was forthcoming. Whatever the answer, it is common knowledge that after 30 years much of Walter Hooper’s pivotal role in Lewis affairs was rather quickly taken over in the 1990s by Doug Gresham. Through the decades a few outsiders watch and wonder.