The last bookaneer

Matthew Pearl

For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public meant that books could be published without an author's permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially. The literary pirates were known as bookaneers. On the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to stop this literary underground. On Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon two adversaries, the gallant Pen Davenport -- accompanied by bookseller Fergins -- and the monstrous Belial, set out for the Pacific island.