CurtisCamp

Early in our ownership of the Curtis plates, we decided to finance a book. The idea was simple: photograph the plates as objects for the first time and publish them alongside the story of Curtis and The North American Indian. We hired a respected author and arranged publication through a major press. We paid the author’s salary. So far, so good.

What we did not know was that an employee of ours — a man whose day job was supposed to be working for us — was spending his time writing an entirely different Curtis book for a well-known Curtis dealer. On our dime.

When our book was published, the dealer saw that some of the images overlapped with what he considered exclusive to his own book, ones that he licensed from the Curtis Family. He sued us for infringement.

When we discovered what our employee had been doing, we fired him. As part of the separation, we received his one-third interest in the dealer’s book — the very book whose author was now suing us. So now, we owned a 33⅓% interest in a lawsuit against ourselves, as we owned a third of the plaintiff’s project.

But the cascade was not finished. Our third partner in the Curtis collection needed money and had borrowed from the same dealer, putting up his 25% interest in our business as collateral. So, if the dealer had foreclosed on the debt, he would have owned 25% of 33% of his suit against us. Get it?

To clean the whole thing up, we paid off our partner’s debt, separated him from the business, and closed the circle. The dealer, upon learning that he was effectively suing one of his own partners — and was also, maybe, a party to the suit — decided to drop everything.

As far as I know, that book was never published. Our book was, but our share of the advance royalty payment never reached us — paid to another participant by mistake. The book was critically received, but it did not clear the advance. The publisher asked for part of it back, adding injury to insult.

To summarize: we financed a book, paid an employee who was secretly writing a competing book for someone else, got sued by that someone else, acquired a stake in his book through the firing of the employee, watched the lawsuit collapse under its own weight, and then bought out our own partner’s debt to the man who had just sued us.

The plates, as usual, were fine. They had been through worse.

— The Camp Keeper

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