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A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.
The real move here is own one company that sells these books, cancel them, then own another shell company in another country that loudly says they will keep printing the original. Rake in cash from both sides.
I like it. Have two imprints of the same publisher get in a fight over whether work X is racist/sexist/homophobic. Make sure that both commit some unforced "errors" that ratchet up the vitriol. Liberal and conservative media jump in the fight and give a bunch of free earned media coverage. Everyone buys their preferred identity marker. Then go buy a new house in the Hamptons.
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Seeing news about James Bond being next on the chopping block. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/25/james-bond-books-edited-remove-racist-references/
Having mixed feelings about this. On one hand I wasn't fond of Ian Flemming's James Bond, though I only read one of his books as a teen. On the other hand the re-writing of history makes me irrationally angry. 'Sensitivity readers' are not something I like, I guess.
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They apparently didn't extend this to the audiobooks however. Whatever old recordings remaining for sale seem more like an oversight than an active decision.
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Prediction: The classic versions will quietly disappear from print and sale at some point in the next year with no fanfare nor announcement. If they were ever offered at all; I'll need to see these Classic Editions in an actual store to believe it.
This is not a win for those against newspeak, this is delaying the publisher's plans for a little while, at best. A win would have been the total scrappage of the censored versions.
As a kid, I read the version where the Oompa-Loompas were African pygmies. When did that version go out of print?
I believe that change was made by Dahl himself. He decided to make them hippies instead.
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I suspect it will go the other way. I think the classic editions will remain on shelves while the new editions will be hard to come by. Parents buy books, and parents will remember reading the originals as children. I doubt there are many parents that think it vital that their children aren't exposed to black cloaks or fat children in their reading material.
My prediction is that the publisher will keep the bowdlerised versions on sale in a limited quantity to save face, but the market will drive them to sell the original books predominantly.
I think most parents won't even know that there are multiple versions, much less notice which one they're buying. How many people know about this now, when it's making the most news, and how many will have forgotten about it or never heard of it in the future? I doubt Penguin will stamp "New Bowdlerized Versions" on the covers of the Bowdlerized ones, or even something like "Improved and Updated for a Modern Audience." At best, it'd probably be mixed in inconspicuously in the block of text at the back. Parents will just buy whatever is available, and I'd fully expect that all the best marketing and shelf spaces would be devoted to the New and Improved versions.
Against your point: I've seen the original "Dahl's getting rewritten" story in right-aligned print newspapers and online on The Guardian (original story, more criticism, "collection of Roald Dahl’s books with unaltered text is to be published"). That's both sides, online and in print.
What fraction of parents do you think are actually reading these articles, or even seeing the headlines? I'd estimate less than 10%.
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Interestingly, this has only been generally accepted since the success of Harry Potter. Pre-HP, publishers and authors behaved as if they thought children’s books were bought by schools (or by parents in response to teacher recommendations). Since children with options won’t read anything that has been through the average scholl librarian’s filter, YA fiction wasn’t really a thing.
Your typo made me think: how does the Scholastic Book Fair (which I think is still a thing even today) figure into this? That's one avenue in which a kid has a lot of input into what books they want to get and read.
Granted, this is assuming your claim that books aimed at kids did indeed find more success in institution purchases than in normal retail sales back then.
We're having one at my school next week, so I suppose I'll look if there's anything like Roald Dahl's work there. I didn't look very closely at longer stories last year, but my impression was a lot of pop science kinds of things with slime or toys attached. I got something about the ocean because there was a shark with moving jaws on the cover. If a publishing company is trying to get more book fair or B&N money out of parents, toys, magnets, pop-ups, furry covers, and fun gimmicks generally seem like the way to go, especially for older works that are easy to check out from the library.
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YA fiction is considerably older than Harry Potter. Heinlein's juveniles and L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, for instance.
Harry Potter wasn't YA fiction, being aimed slightly younger. At least the first few books, anyway.
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I think they got much more widespread criticism than they expected and will quietly step away from the bowdlerized versions. I doubt they will fly off the shelves, so I don't predict that they will be unavailable for sale in a year, but I predict that the original versions will continue to be widely available.
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I agree with your prediction. There are many ways to not make something available while making it "available," and I see little reason to believe that the same people who wanted these Bowdlerized editions to be created to begin with wouldn't go with one of those ways. If they made some sort of public announcement and/or contractual commitment to print at least as many copies of the original versions as the Bowdlerized ones and to enforce some sort of mechanism by which the former are always accompanied wherever the latter are available, that might be one thing, but they didn't. Barring further developments, I fully expect the state of the books in 2025 to be virtually identical to what would have happened if there had been no pushback at all.
Also agreed. I'm not even sure this counts as even a step towards a win. The fact that Bowdlerizing any old work of fiction like this was seriously considered shows a deep rot in the system, and anything short of firing every decision maker who signed off on this to serve as an example to what happens when you make a mockery of the industry and annihilate Penguin's reputation wouldn't be a win, IMHO. Coming short of that, just scrapping the Bowdlerized versions would have been something close to a win, but even that didn't happen.
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This, on the heels of AP rescinding its guidance to not use "the" in phrases like "the disabled, the poor and the French"!
They'll still crucify you if you dare to mention the Ukraine.
Who? The French?
"The" Associated Press.
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Elites and government leaders organize to influence cultural production in the private sphere, the cathedral strikes again!
Plans to replace, not produce in addition, an inferior version were this time foiled. No regime is so total as to get its way 100% of the time; even nazis backed down from the T4 programme after Catholic backlash, yet few would say their grip on power wasn't terrifyingly strong.
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For now. But they've betrayed their intentions. They own the IP, this is what they want, and they'll bide their time until they get another chance, or they think nobody is watching. It's what other organizations have done.
How do you decide this is a case of what they always intended instead of drumming up controversy to get attention?
If they were acting out of moral concern, why back down in the face of opposition? I suppose there's a chance that they simply hadn't considered the consequences of announcing they would do this, and I don't want to deny that people can sometimes just collectively fail to use their brains on accident, but that seems even more unlikely.
Moreover, they're book publishers. Are we to think they haven't had debates about this kind of thing for ages? I doubt this is the case either.
So either they ignored a debate that would have a very high chance of playing out in their business, or they tried capitalizing on controversy to sell books. When was the last time Roald Dahl even got in the news?
Any action has material and political limits that it might run into. Even if you think something is right, the pushback might be too much for you and you'll opt to push for the same goal later, or through more discrete channels. They talk about this stuff openly, you know.
I agree that there are people who subvert the spirit of democracy to pass laws and rules that benefit them. But I think the situation is different here from the example you cite.
For starters, I'm not clear on what the limits actually are in this case. Presumably, Puffin and Penguin are only willing to go so far in pushing this new line of books. But the response to them seems mostly at outrage over changing the books. Have you found any demands to boycott or threaten legal action against them? I haven't. It's largely just empty words, and I think they'd be monitoring the response with an intense focus to see just this.
Secondly, they ultimately backed down and said they'd publish both versions. This makes for an excellent marketing ploy - plenty of people will probably go and buy a copy to have an "untainted version".
I can't fully discount the idea that Puffin will quietly just remove the classic version eventually. But if the botched delivery of this update is anything to go by, people will more widely have the original anyways, and finding illegal copies online isn't that hard even now. So if the goal is having people read the more moral version, then I think Puffin is planning uncharacteristically long into the future, for a company anyways.
So what?
A recent theme in my comments is the "democratic model" of our society, and how I think it's bunk, and I am once again forced to go on my little rant. From the youngest years we are taught that not only do we live in a democracy, but that somehow our entire society follows the principle of "the more people hold an opinion, the more important that opinion is" with the implicit assumption that no other factors are relevant. The idea that publishers are afraid of boycotts is laughable, show me the last successful consumer boycott. Even when they just produce shit no one wants to watch because it's crap, sans any boycott, half the time they proceed to shit on their audience for "not getting it" rather than adjusting to the majority opinion so they can start making money.
In my mind it's pretty clear that the democratic model is false. I think it's completely fine if you think it's true, and want to argue for it, but you actually have to do it, rather than assume it's true by default, and expect everyone else to make arguments within that framework.
The problem here is that you can come up with an explanation like no matter what happens. If they back down, it's a marketing ploy. If they don't back down, like in the case of Blood Heir from a few years ago, or the withdrawal of the Winnetou books in Germany last summer, you can just say "well, I guess the books really were that controversial, and the author / publisher wanted to avoid backlash".
It's an ok theory, but a theory is not evidence for itself.
The goal is to have people of a particular ideology have control over media. They're not acting as a company, the people working for the company are acting as members of a religion they want to spread far and wide.
Perhaps I'm missing the point, but if they're not even afraid of boycotts, then what are the limits here? You argued that their actions had material limits, but you now seem to be arguing that they don't care if you boycott their materials or not. If so, they would have greater reason to not back down if they actually cared, no?
If Puffin had stuck to their guns, I would have no way of calling it a cash grab and I acknowledge that. It would have, in my opinion, been them sacrificing money to make a moral statement.
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People in charge are hired managers responsible to other hired managers, all the way up to BlackRock/Vanguard. The goal they care about is their personal future, and are wary of anything that might endanger it, like, for example, being suspected of racism and hate.
"The book we just printed is full of racism! There is massive outcry and backlash against the company! Who authorized it for print?"
"At your last job, why were you publishing racist books? Are your racist, or willing accomplice of racists? Why should we hire hater like you?"
Sure, this might happen. Except Puffin has said the following:
This seems to suggest an internal motivation, not an external one. Of course, I think it wouldn't be hard for someone to plan on generating a controversy this way regardless, but I'll admit I can't decisively prove it.
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They believe in what they are doing for moral reasons but back down when pressured enough. Happens all the time. My wife’s public university offered course credit to protest Kavanaugh but backtracked when it got media attention. That clearly wasn’t a publicity stunt.
This idea that nobody actually believes in this and it’s all a plan to drum up controversy annoys me. It’s reminiscent of “it’s just a few kids on college campuses.” Or suggestions that cancellations are just cover for severing ties with people for business reasons. Why is it so hard to accept that there are lots of true believers out there?
Al Franken was not a strategic move but true believers going crazy. A&E canceling all their most popular shows in 2020 was not a tactical business decision it was a moral panic. There are lots of believers out there in legit positions of authority.
Your example has, how to put it, an indelicacy to it that makes me see it as someone genuinely trying to do a moral thing. The Dahl books controversy seems almost perfectly tailored for maximum spread over something that they would very likely have thought through perfectly.
I don't have a problem with the idea that people out there want to modernize the language of older books by cutting out that which is unappealing to them. But that's not the same as saying that the people at Puffin necessarily want to do that in this case. That requires more proof.
I think the fact that they did it is pretty good evidence that they wanted to do it.
We know they wanted to do it, the question is why they want to. If they were being totally honest, was their conscious and major driving reason that they found the language objectionable? Or, as I suspect, were they doing this in a way to generate attention by surfing the line?
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Not moral concern, moralist concern. It is performative and the reaction was way more negative than they expected - even the Queen gave them shit! I think you are right about it being a publicity stunt, but I strongly - like farm strongly - doubt that whoever was in charge of this move was counting on or even considered a negative reaction. They expected it to go like it has a dozen times before - anyone who didn't like it would be called a wrongthinker and hounded into silence, possibly with threats to their livelihood.
I don't see how you say it is performative if they, as you argue, believe what they are doing something moral. It's not performative for me to do X if I think it is a moral thing to do, even if I don't necessarily think about it fully when I do it.
Sure it is. Goodwife Hetty sees young Henry and Constance canoodling by the river, even though Constance is betrothed to Matthew, the ostler's son. She tells her priest about it out of moral concern, but she tells everyone else about it performatively - the moral concern is just an excuse to raise her own standing in the community.
You're assuming these are different. Why does telling everyone else raise her social standing? Because she is doing an act the community sees to be pro-social, blowing the whistle on people breaking social norms.
Raising her social standing is the INCENTIVE to get her to behave morally in the first place. That's not performative, it's the core of our social programming.
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That's possible. It's also possible Hetty is zealous is enforcing the morality of her community, and informing everyone she's seen a bad thing happen would be her way of ensuring everyone knew of Henry and Constance's immoral actions.
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Or a publisher wanting to create a reason why everyone needs to buy a new copy of a book that's been in print forever.
I remember reading Dahl books as a kid and it seemed like they were always used, so creating a reason for parents to buy books new might be a benefit. And TBF I don't think that woke publishing employees have a great model for their typical customers.
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Companies don’t do that in my experience. You want controversy? Just get the CEO to say nigger or something. Controversy is the easiest thing to generate in the world and companies mostly seem terrified of it. Also I have never worked at a company where they said “Let’s do something that will piss off all our customers to generate controversy”
I disagree. Scott talked about this in his post on the IDW - you have to straddle the line carefully, not just go into being seen as outright wrong or immoral. This book change seems nearly perfectly tailored to generate free publicity for Roald Dahl books - you have plenty of people who will take either side of the most obvious and common arguments: don't like don't read, rewriting historical books for modern audiences, making people more moral, etc.
You have to pick a side on an incendiary issue that directly relates to the thing at hand. A CEO saying "nigger" or something similar would make the controversy about the CEO, not the company, and people might very well decide they won't support that business at all even if the product is good.
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That didn't go so well for Papa John.
Yes, that's his point.
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