Society of Authors and its Medical Writers Group.

The Society of Authors, which celebrated its centenary last year, was founded by Walter Besant to promote the interests of authors and defend their rights. Besant was supported by well known writers of the day, including and he was fortunate in securing Tennyson as the society's first president. This tradition of successful writers giving their time and energy in working for the profession has been maintained. Among the roll of honour of those who have assisted in activities and campaigns of the society are of course, many well known contemporary authors. Bernard Shaw, ever valiant and tireless on behalf of his less successful colleagues, put succinctly the need for such a society: When we begin writing, we are so poor and so busy that we have neither the time nor the means to defend ourselves against the commercial organisations which exploit us. When we become famous, we become famous suddenly, passing at one bound from the state in which we are, as I have said, too poor to fight our own battles, to a state in which our time is so valuable that it is not worth our while wasting any of it on lawsuits and bad debts. We all, emiinent and obscure alike, need the Authors' Society. We all owe it a share of our time, our means, our influence. In 1890 the society's journal The Author first appeared as a sixpenny monthly publication, with Besant as editor. In his opening editorial he explained that it was intended to be "the organ of literary men and women of all kinds" and that it was to become "the public record of transactions conducted in the interests of literature, which have hitherto been secret for want of such an organ." The journal has been published continuously ever since, although from 1919 as a quarterly. From 1961 until his recent death the journal was edited by Richard Findlater, associate editor of the Observer and eminent writer of theatrical history and biography as well as works about authorship. In his foreword to Author! Author!, a centenary anthology, he wrote: "The journal aspires to be informative, on occasions enlightening, even at times, with luck, entertaining. But its prime concern-now as in Besant's day-is the business and condition of authorship." Copyright and contracts The society's first major task was to get new copyright legislation and to broaden international copyright to include the United States, where …