Big Tobacco Sues Little Publisher

I decided not to mention the publication of these little books last summer when I first spotted an article about their release. There was just something that rubbed me the wrong way about books that seemed, at least at first glance, to glorify a product as horrible as cigarettes. I'm extremely anti-smoking, and have been so for decades, and I really hated to even mention an industry like "big tobacco" which, in my opinion, has no legitimate reason for even existing.

But the story is in the news again because, according to London's Guardian Online, big tobacco is now demanding via the court house that all the unsold Hemingway books (first in line in the above picture) be pulped because they too closely resemble real packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes and will "damage the health of the brand." Maybe the kind folks at British American Tobacco should be worrying more about the health of their customers than the health of the Lucky Strike brand...

Last summer, the small British publisher and design company Tank hit on the idea of producing a range of classic books packaged like cigarettes. Abridged works and short stories by Kafka and Conrad, Tolstoy and Kipling, Hemingway and Stevenson, which looked like packs of 20 cigarettes, were duly distributed through bookshops and the Design Museum.

The books, released as Tales to Take Your Breath Away at the start of the cigarette ban in pubs and restaurants last July, were well received by the design press and have made popular Christmas presents. But now the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack.

...

Masoud Golsorkhi, co-founder and creative director of Tank, which is based in London, said: "I had been toying with the idea of using the cigarette packs for some time. When we heard about the smoking ban it seemed like it was now or never.

"I thought that producing a book that was small enough to be easily carried everywhere with you, like a packet of cigarettes, could be a good alternative - and the packaging made it fun."

...

TankBooks responded via its Brighton-based lawyers, Be., to BAT's claims by showing that a large number of cigarette brands have a circular motif similar to that of Lucky Strike. It says members of the public are unlikely to mistake a Hemingway novel for a packet of cigarettes.

My money is on the tobacco giant. History tells us that those guys are not bashful about distorting the truth and have the money and lawyers to do it well.