They're censoring James Bond now. Is nothing sacred?
Seriously, as I noted a few days ago, this sort of thing is standard in the publishing business.
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6 comments:
Yeah, some of those first edition Hardy Boys were pretty bad, plus they just got updated more generally to keep them relevant to kids.
And a lot of Agatha Christie was changed to be less offensive or just more relevant in the US editions when they came out. (It has been really weird reading the UK versions via kindle editions since I grew up reading US 1970s paperback reprints.)
I wish someone had gone through and sanitized Three Men on the Bummel. It didn't have the staying power of Three Men on a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) because it starts with a completely pointless exceedingly racist unfunny anecdote that has nothing to do with the rest of the book. And after that it's both an interesting look at pre-war Germany as well as having amusing snippets that influenced early cartoons, for example.
There's money that could be made getting rid of the cringy parts of a lot of Gutenberg books. Lots of PG Wodehouse that never got reprinted, for example. Instead it's just lost, except what got borrowed by later artists.
I mean, maybe we want to keep the earlier editions around for historical purposes, or for scholars to use, but these are mass-market editions being sold for amusement. Publishers rightly realize some of the stuff that used to be acceptable would be really off-putting to modern audiences. It's a commerical decision, in other words.
Exactly. And there are things that would be marketable that are completely dead (except to scholars) because nobody made the changes needed to make them popular today. Even when other books by the same authors that didn't have problematic bits are still widely read.
I tend to think that when a sanitized version is created, it needs to be very clearly labeled as an adaptation, with the adaptation year and adapter's name on the cover. And an up-front essay from that person before the story begins, that talks about the driving philosophy behind their changes. Otherwise, you risk erasing history in ways that I think aren't okay.
But I see myself contradicting this belief in my own life. I'm reading children's literature classics to my elementary-aged child each night, and I'm adapting on the fly without calling it out. I find myself either skipping thing (mostly anti-fat comments, racist comments, or harmful gender stereotypes) or pausing the story to editorialize about things that would not be okay in real life. (If a strange man invites you into his home and proposes taking you on a series of adventures that you must keep secret from your parents: NOT OK IN REAL LIFE.)
That sounds like a good plan -- then publishers could sell the original text and the updated text. I like the idea of the forward, explaining the changes too. Maybe with a link to the original text online?
And yes to editing the text when we're reading it aloud!
OMG The Secret Garden... so very very racist
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