The thing was that in some of my very first and oldest traveller's tales, which I wrote when I did not possess the necessary experience yet, I let the events I described take place before a geographical background which I took from well known, readily accessible books. This is not just allowed, it even happens quite frequently. To adapt descriptions of places for one's own needs, can never be a theft. A literary theft, plagiarism this is, is only committed when essential components of another author's mental creation are copied and then used in a manner which makes them an essential component of the plagiarist's work and thereby the impression is created that they were his own thoughts. But I have never done something like this and I also never will. Works of geography, especially when the information contained has become common knowledge, can be used without thinking of it twice, as long as no entire printed sheets or sequences of pages are copied identically and the second author's work, in spite of the copied parts, forms an independent mental achievement. In the introduction to Voigtländer's book on "Authorship and Publishing Law" it reads: "No person creates the world of his thoughts solely by himself. He constructs it on top of what others have invented, said, and written before him or together with him. Only then at best, his very own creation begins. Even the most creative of all activities, the one of a poet, ranks highest, achieves the greatest success, when it consecrates with an artistic form those ideas, which along with the poet, are also thought and felt by his entire people. And not even the form is entirely the poet's property, because the form is supplied by the refined language, "which creates literature and thinks for you", and which has given to many a man who thinks himself to be a poet more than the form, but also thoughts or the appearance of thoughts. To put it brief, writers and artists are with their knowledge and abilities in the midst and on the top of the cultural achievements of many millennia. If Goethe had grown up on a lonely island, he would not have become Goethe. But once someone has been granted such a gifted spirit, that he has been able to advance the cultural achievements of mankind by one step, because he has been allowed to continue the ancestors' work, then it is just right _that_his_ _work_in_turn_shall_in_due_time_be_made_available_for_others,_to_ _use_it_freely,_not_just_its_contents,_but_also_its_form."_