Abe Books Searches for First Editions of 'The Iliad' Climb after Release of The Boy Next Door; Film Critics Lay Siege on the Film's Script

The Guardian reports that searches for "The Iliad, first edition" on the online marketplace AbeBooks have climbed since the release of J-Lo's new movie The Boy Next Door, which starts with her character being given a first edition of, you guessed it: The Iliad.

MEANWHILE, critics from Jezebel to Melville House have penned a number of choice responses to the movie reference. Melville House (via its blog, Moby Lives) writes, "We have two choices here... We can accept that Claire has a deep and ready knowledge of obscure translations and editions of The Iliad, and she recognizes this as a first edition of one such version. That would be the easy way out. Or, we can commit the cardinal sin of new criticism and delve beneath the surface of the text, by asking the screenwriter: WTF were you thinking?"

From The Guardian:

A scene in Jennifer Lopez’s new film in which her character is given a supposed first edition of The Iliad has prompted viewers to attempt to find their own first edition of an epic poem composed at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.

According to books marketplace AbeBooks, since Lopez’s film The Boy Next Door was released in the US on 23 January, “The Iliad, first edition” has been its top search term, ahead of To Kill A Mockingbird. AbeBooks attributes this to a scene in the film in which Lopez’s character, a high-school teacher, is given a hardback copy of the book by the teenager with whom she is to go on to have a dangerous affair.

“Oh my God – this is a first edition? I can’t accept this, it must have cost a fortune,” she tells her admirer. “It was a buck at a garage sale – one man’s trash...” he replies.

“It appears people who have watched the film are trying to identify the actual edition handed to Lopez, which has dark yellow and blue boards. I cannot match the book seen in the movie to anything currently for sale on AbeBooks. It could be a movie prop and not even be a real book. It certainly appears to be an attractive book,” said AbeBooks spokesman Richard Davies.

Sadly for the film’s fans, The Iliad, the 15,000-line poem about the Trojan war attributed to Homer, was composed around 700BC, long before the invention of the printing press in 1440. The oldest complete text is from the end of the 10th century, the Venetus A manuscript, with the work not widely disseminated in English until George Chapman’s 17th-century translation, immortalised by John Keats’s poem. [...]

Learn more at The Guardian.