The Doubled Rim

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the basket-maker's yard, where a rival has been seen selling the very pattern that took nine years to arrive at.

Two makers see their work copied plain,
Same weave, same shape, same market lane.
One spends the season proving theft,
One weaves a better one by May.
Both lost the pattern. Both were robbed.
Which yard was busier that autumn?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two basket-makers in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally fine. Each had, over years, arrived at a pattern of her own that sold better than anything else on her bench.

And each, in the same spring, found a rival at the far end of the market selling something extremely close to it.

The first went to war, and it is difficult to blame her. She had spent nine years on that pattern and the copy was shameless. She spoke about it to anybody who would listen, wrote to the man twice, raised it at the guild, and spent the better part of a season on the injustice.

Two things came of it. The customers, who did not care and had never known there was an original, heard a maker complaining about a competitor, which is a sound nobody enjoys and which suggests, unfairly but powerfully, that the two products must be much the same. And her bench stood idle while she wrote letters, so she made nothing new that year and the pattern she was defending was the newest thing she had.

By autumn there were three men making it, since a pattern that provokes a public quarrel is a pattern worth having.

The second maker looked at the copy carefully, which is the part almost nobody does, and found what is nearly always there. The shape was right and the weave was wrong. He had copied what could be seen from six feet away and had not copied the doubled rim, because the doubled rim takes an extra hour and he did not know why it was there.

So she did three things, none of which involved him.

She said, in her own material and to her own customers, what the rim was for and why it took the hour, which is a thing she had never bothered to explain when nobody else was making baskets like hers. Her pattern had been visible for years and never described.

She put a small woven mark into the base, so that the town had a way of telling, and mentioned it once without any accusation in it.

And she spent the season she might have spent on the quarrel making the next pattern, which was better, and which she brought out in May.

By autumn the rival was competently making last year's basket and she was selling this year's, which is a position she then occupied permanently, because a man who copies is always working from something already finished.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A copy is always of the surface, since the reasons are invisible and cannot be lifted. Your rival can take the shape, the words, the offer and the price. What he cannot take is why each piece is there, which is the part that took you years and which he will discover only by getting it wrong for a season or two. That is why the correct response is nearly always to explain and to advance rather than to defend.

Explaining is the move people miss. A distinctive thing you have never described is a gift to an imitator, because the town sees two baskets and has no vocabulary for the difference. Say what the rim is for. The workshop letter made this argument about your ordinary care; it applies twice over to the thing that is genuinely yours, and the moment to say it is the moment somebody else starts making it.

Then the arithmetic of the quarrel, which is where most of the damage is done. Complaining in public costs you your bench, your temper and your dignity, and buys nothing, since customers rarely know or care who was first and will hear only a trader speaking ill of a competitor. If there is a real legal wrong, take it to somebody whose trade that is and say nothing further. Otherwise the sole reply worth making is a better basket in May.

And take the compliment, because it is a real one. Nobody copies a thing that is not working, which means the imitation is the clearest evidence you will ever receive that you have found something worth having. The yellow wheels can be painted by anybody; what cannot be copied is thirty years of always having had them, and the same is true of everything you keep doing after your rival has grown bored.

Three questions, and look at the actual copy rather than at your feelings about it:

1. What did they not copy? Set the two side by side and find the omissions. There will be several, and they will be the parts that cost time or knowledge, and they are your whole argument.
2. Have you ever explained why it is as it is? If not, the market has no language for the difference, and you have left them to judge by appearance, which is the one contest a copy can win.
3. What will you have that is new by May? Name it and put the date on it. The season spent on the grievance and the season spent on the next thing are the same season.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which yard was busier?

The one that made a new basket. Both women were robbed in exactly the same way and neither got the pattern back, since patterns cannot be got back. One spent the summer establishing that she had been wronged, which she had, and which earned her nothing but three more imitators and a reputation for grievance. The other explained the rim, marked the base, and was a year ahead by September, which is the only place a maker can ever stand where a copier cannot follow.

The verse:

They took the shape, they left the reason,
For reasons cannot be undone.
Say why it's so, then spend the season
On what they'll copy come the spring.

Until next time. Go and set the copy beside your own, list what they left out, and say publicly what it is for.

P.S. There is one thing worth doing quietly and at once, which is to write down and date what you have made, with a sketch, so that if the matter ever does become a legal one you are not reconstructing nine years from memory. Do it in the same hour you decide not to quarrel, and then go back to the bench.

Also in the archive: The Sign Nobody Read, The Yellow Wheels and The Carrier Who Charged Half.