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Most Incompetent Letter from a Vanity Press Ever

January 22, 2014

Yuck. This is the first one that didn't even bother to include a title of something I've published:

Dear Jon Cogburn,

I am writing on behalf of a German publishing house, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.

In the course of a research on the internet, I came across a reference to your paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic".

Has anyone in the world ever written exactly one paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic"? Not only must the paper discuss all these things, but for the communication to be felicitous it must be the only paper you have written on these topics. And if the author of the e-mail really came across a reference to it, why couldn't they tell me the title? And why the quotation marks? Are these scare quotes and there's some Pythonesque wink-wink-nudge-nudge thing I'm missing. Or are they McWhorterian "shout quotes." Neither one makes sense.

Purported Nigerians trying to get me to help them access frozen funds pen less infelicitous missives.

And then there's this:

LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing is an academic publisher which specializes since 2002 in the publication of high quality monographs, master theses, diploma theses, dissertations and postdoctoral theses from renowned institutions worldwide.

Really? Really? And not just a new name for VDM Verlag, which has been roundly exposed as a vanity press?

I am therefore inquiring whether you would be keen on publishing the above mentioned work with us.

Aha, thus the quotes! They were mentioning, not using. I gather that in some such letters they use Quinean corner quotes to forestall further use/mention confusion.

In other words, we would make your work available in printed form and market it on a global scale through well-known distributors at no cost to you.

Marketing on a global scale!

But wait, they don't get amazon in North Korea, and so won't be able to see all the vanity press titles that amazon lists for free. Is that really truly global then? What's "LAP Lambert" (scare quotes) going to do about this whole North Korea problem?

I would appreciate if you could confirm your interest with a reply email and we will send a detailed brochure to you.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you and kind regards,

————
Kind regards,
Margit Schmöltz
Acquisition Editor

LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing is a trademark of
OmniScriptum GmbH & Co. KG

Heinrich-Böcking-Str. 6-8, 66121,
Saarbrücken, Germany

Feh.

Please, please, please if you get one of these letters, respond by simply sending back this youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-PmuRKIGmo . If enough of us do this, maybe they will up their spamming game a little bit at least.

Posted in Jon Cogburn

5 responses to “Most Incompetent Letter from a Vanity Press Ever”

David Wallace

January 22, 2014

I can top that. Here’s the first line of an email I had a year ago from “Review of European Studies”:
I have had an opportunity to read your paper “” in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and can tell from your work that you are an expert in this field.
(Just to be clear, that “” isn’t me suppressing the paper title for some reason. It’s a verbatim quote.)

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Jon Cogburn

January 22, 2014

Ha!
Seriously, they clearly thought you were an expert on nothing. Which is not equivalent to thinking that you fail to be an expert on anything.
If I understood mid-period Heidegger (or even just Friedman or Priest on this) better, I could continue in this vein. Which is probably just one more reason that it’s a good thing I don’t understand mid-period Heidegger better.
Anyhow, given your expertise in this field, I’m going to go look up your paper on

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James Rocha

January 22, 2014

Mine is actually even more vague:
Dear James Rocha,
I am writing on behalf of a German publishing house, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.
In the course of a research on the internet, I came across a reference to your paper on “Philosophy”.
Though, to be fair, I did recently write a paper on “Philosophy.” My claim was that publishing houses are not interested in publishing books on “Philosophy” these days; publishers are always looking for books that are precisely on philosophy, which is a bit biased and one-sided if you ask me. So, I believe they are reaching out to prove my claim in that paper to be incorrect, so I may have to issue a “correction” on that point, but only after LAP “publishes” my book on “Philosophy.”

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bzfgt

January 22, 2014

I don’t have it anymore, but the one I got was full of typos, which I thought was suspicious for an academic press…it didn’t really read any better than those Nigerian gold things. I googled them and found out they want 800 dollars or something like that.

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Trudy Scales

January 30, 2014

This is overwhelmingly coincidental. I just got this email, and googled part of it to see what the heck it was (because it didn’t give a title of anything I’ve published, like you mentioned) and of all the people in all the internet that could have had a similar experience, it happened to be someone I know personally… nice. 🙂

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