So now Little, Brown won’t be publishing Tintin in the Congo at all (”Little, Brown Cancels Tintin in the Congo,” by Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly):
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which had been planning to publish Tintin in the Congo, a book criticized for its racist, Colonial-era depictions of Africans, has quietly pulled the title from its fall list, PW has learned. The publisher also said it will not include the book in a forthcoming box set of all 24 books in the Tintin series.
Well, nobody said you have to publish something you don’t like–or that your customers don’t want. But pulling the book from what would have been a definitive boxed set has me wondering: did Thomas Bowdler ever stay the night in a Potemkin Village?
What I mean to say is that, if some kid gets hooked on Tintin now and grows up to tell his friends that he’s a fan of Hergé, he won’t really have seen the whole picture, will he?
