A little-known human-generated literary hoax

1980

New York: Vantage Press.

First edition in publisher’s green cloth, with author, title, and publisher gilt-stamped on spine. Color pictorial dust wrapper with cover illustration. 14 x 21cm. [6] 1–136 [2] pp. Inscribed (with T. S. Eliot quotation) by Eric Hughes, who is likely the book’s copyright holder—and perhaps secretly its author—G. E. Hughes. Edition size unknown; OCLC locates a single copy.

Accession Number: 2017.7.1

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Bagabone, Hem ‘I Die Now (1980) is perhaps the first novel that was purportedly written by a computer.

The back flap of the dust jacket states this about the book's origins: “Can a computer write a novel? To find out, some experts in literature, linguistics, and computers at the Institute of Science and Technology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, programed a computer, Melpomene, with English verb patterns and semantic (i.e., meaning) units drawn from twentieth-century women writers, as well as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and some ‘angry young men’ of the 1960s. Then they added some patterns and units from Pidgin English and French, and the astounding result is Bagabone, Hem ‘I Die Now. Melpomene, which is the name of the Greek muse of tragedy, picked the title; translated from Pidgin English, it means, ‘Bagabone (a character in the novel) is dying.’”

Following its publication, Computerworld published an article (“Publisher Claims Computer Composed Novel,” Aug. 25, 1980, p. 23) effectively defeating the publisher’s claim about the work's computational origins. In the article, James Meehan and Robert de Beaugrande, contemporary experts in automatic story generation, deem the novel to be human-written. More damning still, another source reports that there is no ‘Institute of Science and Technology’ at Jagiellonian University. We believe that the book is an outright hoax, and quite an intriguing one.

The book’s publisher, Vantage Press, was the largest vanity press in operation last century, and they would have been paid to print the book. As it turns out, the copyright holder for Bagabone was not a computer, but a human—an Englishman named G. E. Hughes—who could not be reached by Computerworld. Intriguingly, our copy of this scarce title is inscribed by one ‘Eric Hughes’—we assume this to be the same Mr. Hughes, which likely makes this an author-inscribed copy. If you know more than we do, please reach out!

We do not know how many copies of the book were published, but there seem to be very few in existence today. OCLC locates just a single copy, and we are aware of only one other copy in addition to it and ours. A 1990 lawsuit against Vantage Press alleged that the publishers failed to adequately promote their titles, and indeed, this curious title received scant press attention.