Trying to Understand the Motives of ‘The Spine Collector’

Myself, like many others that read news about the publishing industry, have been following the off-and-on of a person known as The Spine Collector. 

Though the name originates from an August 2021 article by Reeves Wiedeman and Lila Shapiro in Vulture, many reporters had written about the story well before that, including an October 2018 article in Publishers Weekly and a December 2020 article by the New York Times.

The scam was both simple and incredibly complex. The person behind the scam would reach out to authors posting as various people in the publishing industry (usually people the author already knew) and attempt to procure a PDF of their latest manuscript.

It’s a simple phishing scam that required a great deal of work on the attacker’s part. Not only did they register an estimated 160 domains, usually close misspellings of industry-related domains, but they needed a large amount of industry knowledge including lingo and the names/information of relevant people.

The scam made its biggest headlines when it targeted well-known authors. For example, in 2019 the scammer targeted Margaret Atwood and attempted to procure a copy of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Others targeted including Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan and Ethan Hawke.

However, the bulk of the scam’s targets (and eventual victims) were relatively unknown authors publishing works with little commercial value. This included everything from a collection of Icelandic short stories to many first-time authors who had little to no recognition.

But the story may have come to something a head as, on January 6, 2022, the FBI arrested a 29-yeard-old Italian man named Filippo Bernardini on suspicion that he was the mastermind of the operation. Bernardini, for his part, has pleased not guilty.

Bernardini worked for the publisher Simon & Schuster as part of their foreign rights department. If he is The Spine Collector, this could likely explain how that person had such large amounts of inside information about the publishing industry.

But even if Bernardini turns out to clearly be The Spine Collector and this really is the end of the whodunit, another mystery remains: Why?

For all the time, money and energy spent on the scam, for all the pain and fear it caused, there still is no clear motive. Years after it began, no one seems to have an answer as to why it was being done at all.

Trying to Find a Motive

This story is a bit of an outlier for things talked about on this site. It is neither a plagiarism story nor a copyright story. 

That because, after they obtained the manuscripts, The Spine Collector did nothing with them. No pirated copies were ever leaked. No one attempted to shop plagiarized versions of the stories to other publishers. No ransoms were demanded. Nothing came of it.

To be clear, the victims still suffered. Not only were they wrangling with the fallout of being caught up in a scam, but they had lost control of something they had been working on for a long time and were worried about what could happen.

In short, the scam may not have hurt authors and publishers financially, it certainly hurt them emotionally.

But the lack of clear motive has made the story all the more intriguing.

As a recent article Alex Shephard in New Republic breaks down, many are trying to find motives, but nothing truly makes sense. 

Perhaps they were trying to further their career as a scout or translator, but then why would anyone put so much effort into very non-lucrative careers? The FBI claims he was “trying to steal other people’s literary ideas for himself” but why target big name authors or anyone so close to publication?

While pirates might do this to leak pre-publication books or hackers do it for ransom, The Spine Collector was (is?) neither of those. Any motive that one can come up with doesn’t make sense from a practical standpoint.

In short, there was no way that this person could have used this approach to steal ideas or really further any career. Most of the books targeted were almost ready for publication and, given the nature of the industry, there’s no way they could have beaten them to print.

The more details one learns, the less things make sense. Why did this person seek PDFs, to the point of rejecting Word files? Why use trickery to obtain books that, in many cases, would have been given for free? If they are seeking notoriety (and assuming ​​Bernardini is The Spine Collector), why plead not guilty and deny your moment in the spotlight?

Though the who, what, when and where seem to have reasonable answers, they why remains a tremendous mystery.

Maybe There is No Motive

I’ve spent decades of my life now trying to understand why people choose to plagiarize. Often times, the explanations are simple: They were worried their work wasn’t good enough, they had poor time management and couldn’t finish, they hated the course and the assignment and couldn’t be bothered, etc.

However, sometimes, there is no clear motive. Sometimes the plagiarist is a person with ample talent, plenty of time, tons of experience, and no reason to plagiarize at all. 

To be clear, The Spine Collector isn’t a plagiarist (at least that we know) but they are similar in that they repeated closed ethical boundaries and others, in particular victims, are struggling to understand the justifications. 

Sometimes, there just isn’t a satisfactory answer. Maybe they enjoyed doing it. Perhaps running the scam gave them a sense of justice over a perceived wrong. Maybe tricking people gave them a sense of power they lacked elsewhere.

If some plagiarists can plagiarize just because they can, a scammer can too.

It’s possible as the investigation moves forward that we will find some sort of logical explanation. However, I will not be holding my breath. As someone who has spent the past 17 years of their life studying literary misdeeds, I know well that, sometimes, there is no good answer. 

It’s possible that The Spine Collector doesn’t understand their own motives. It’s a sad testament to our world, but sometimes cruelty is simply for cruelty’s sake.

Bottom Line

I was motivated to write about this due to an article by Peter C. Baker in The New Yorker. In the story, he explains how he became a victim of The Spine Collector in September 2020 and the myriad of emotions that it caused him. 

It’s a powerful and personal look at the impacts of the scam. It makes it clear that, while The Spine Collector never seemingly profited from the scam, how his targets were still victims. Just because there was no piracy or plagiarism doesn’t mean it was without harm.

This is important to remember because, as insane as the story is, it is very real, very important and was very hurtful to many that were caught up in it.

Still, much of the mystique of the story is the apparent lack of motive. That’s something that hasn’t changed with the arrest of Bernardini.

Truthfully, we may never know why this scam was perpetuated for so long. We may never know the reasons, goals or intents behind it. Worse yet, there may not even be any reasons. That’s a fact we should brace ourselves for now.

Any information that is forthcoming will be welcome, but I don’t expect any answers that will satisfy the world’s curiosity.