The Press: Try & Stop Him

As a latter-day Joe Miller, Publisher Bennett (Random House) Cerf modestly styles himself “a regular incubator for anecdotes and witty quips.” While incubating his hugely successful (600,000 copies) Try and Stop Me, Cerf went gag-gathering to magazine files, the radio, and his friends, ”devoured reams of columns” by Manhattan gossips.

Last week Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons, two whose words he had read, marked, eaten and regurgitated, were tongue-deep in a campaign to give him indigestion. What riled them, besides the thought of Cerf’s mounting royalties, was his failure to give them credit. It was an old failing of their own.

Groused long-nosed Columnist Lyons, who says that he borrows “from my witty wife” many of the gags he credits to others: “No one has the right to the fruit of our labor; no man, using only scissors and paste pot, should benefit from another’s leg-ear-and-eyework.”

News cannot be copyrighted, and can be reprinted by anyone after 24 hours. Since the words of a newsworthy person (even his barroom babble) are news, neither Leonard Lyons nor Bennett Cerf nor any other writer has a right to copyright them.