Ania Corless, foreign rights director at David Higham, has recently sold the translation rights to Anthony Powell’s quintessentially English saga A Dance to the Music of Time to a French publisher. Mrs Corless also had great success selling the late Roy Lewis to Europe “You’ll never have heard of him,” she says. “His novel was called Why I Ate My Father, then the title was changed to The Evolution Man – it’s been an enormous hit in France and Italy over the last couple of years.”Published in Britain in 1960, the satirical novel made little impact, although it has been staged in France and filmed in the Czech Republic.Mrs Corless argues that surprise at such anomalies is a product of parochial reading habits: “People have different tastes and every country is different – why should one book do the same everywhere? The reason why the English aren’t aware of this is because they read too little in translation.”. The undisputed king of slinky evening dressing opened the Paris spring and summer couture shows yesterday with a mix of the tasteful and the garish, the colours clashing on wildly-patterned sequined dresses, writes Tamsin Blanchard.
Italian designer Versace is a master of jet-set glitz and his clients will be ordering from a selection of evening dresses with antique diamante brooches attached to the straps and cardigans beaded with jewels. Nevertheless, the designer set the trend with floaty fabrics, delicate florals and a romantic sensibility.
Couture is about selling a brand name, which in turn sells millions of dollars worth of fragrances, sunglasses and scarves. This year, Dior and Givenchy are on to a winning streak thanks to the debut collections of two British designers – Galliano at Dior and Alexander McQueen, with his first haute couture collection for Givenchy.. Nearly 500 British businesses have registered “millennium” company names, and hundreds more are using “2000″, as millennium fever sets in. Fever? That’s what the hundreds of small businesses and entrepreneurs busy designing and producing millennium paraphernalia would like you to think.
While politicians and major corporations deliberate about plans for the Greenwich celebrations, everyone else is jumping aboard the millennium commercial bandwagon. From Millennium Footwear to Millennium Bomb Disposal Ltd, over the next three years these businesses will be coming up with every millennial product and service imaginable.Apart from the predictable T-shirts, baseball caps and key- rings, offerings include millennium wallpaper, millennium barometers and millennium rune stones.Hopeful entrepreneurs have been queuing up to trademark the word “millennium”.
But the Trademark Registry in Newport has ruled that it can be used by anyone who wants it.Companies are still able to trademark products that incorporate the word “millennium” – they just can’t own the word exclusively. For example, Greenwich Meridian 2000, a company that is selling “days” at the Greenwich Observatory, has been able to trademark its name.Despite the Trademark Registry’s ruling, there is bound to be much confusion about trademarking. One company in Croydon is convinced that it has exclusive rights to the word “millennium”. Mr Shah, the owner of the Millennium Clothing Company, says: “We are the registered owners for the millennium trademark The actual wording belongs to us. We registered it back in 1992.”In America, a man whose 30th birthday is one minute into the new millennium, has trademarked himself “Mr Millennium” and is bringing out a book and song.
He is looking for a Ms Millennium to join him in his business venture.Apart from the hundreds of people producing souvenir merchandise, event organisers and travel agents are also hoping for big profits. There are numerous millennium tour operators, all competing to come up with the most spectacular holidays.The Millennium Train Company has chartered a Eurostar for the big night; revellers will pay up to pounds 6,000 for the privilege of being in the Channel Tunnel when the clock strikes midnight – and two nights in five-star hotels in London and Paris. And the Millennium Party Company is organising a party in London for up to 12,000 people.. The memory of Anne Frank, possibly the most famous victim of the Holocaust, will be celebrated in Britain in the next few weeks by a new edition of her diary, a major exhibition at Southwark Cathedral and a video on her life.
But unless one party or the other backs down, her name will also be fought over in the High Court in London. The two organisations set up by Otto Frank to perpetuate his daughter’s message are contesting each other’s right to turn her into a trademark. Undeterred by its defeat in a Swiss court, the Anne Frank Fund, based in Basle, has now begun proceedings at the Trademark Registry in London, alleging violation of its rights by the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam. The Foundation is defending the action, which would go to the High Court on appeal, but the Fund is threatening similar cases wherever the Amsterdam body has registered Anne Frank as a trademark, something it has done all over the world.
This “sordid wrangle”, as one source close to both organisations called it, has saddened and appalled many of those working in the name of Anne Frank. Gillian Walnes, executive director of Britain’s Anne Frank Educational Trust, which is mounting the exhibition at Southwark Cathedral, stressed that her organisation had no involvement. “Anne Frank engenders so much goodwill,” said one volunteer, “which is why these differences are so unfortunate.
