Publishers, heed Edward Champion’s demand that we “Stop bowdlerising books for kids“! (British spelling because it’s in the Guardian’s theblogbooks.)

Perhaps this new emphasis on books-as-manuals is why today’s children’s book publishers have been more gutless when reissuing their backlist titles. Presumably motivated by the fear of “corrupting” young minds and offending readers, publishers have edited and elided passages and pictures with a politically correct zeal resembling Soviet agitprop.

Great links to the new and old versions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, too.

Given a recent Major Motion Picture Event, Philip Pullman’s popular His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, 1996; The Subtle Knife, 1997; The Amber Spyglass, 2000) has enjoyed a resurgence of attention. Well, perhaps “enjoyed” doesn’t tell the full story. But rather than link to the many examples of fear for thought, I’ll just link to this interesting interview in Intelligent Life (”An Interview with Philip Pullman,” by Robert Butler). Pullman addresses his critics…

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. “They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It’s very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

How will he respond to those attacks? “A soft answer turneth away wrath, as it says in my favourite book.” (Proverbs 15:1.) So he won’t argue back? “It’s a foolish thing for the teller of a story to answer critics. If you’re putting forward an argument, you can argue back and demonstrate why your argument is better than theirs. But if someone doesn’t like a story you’ve written, what are you going to say? ‘Well, you should’?”

…and trash-talks some children’s classics:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia”. Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. “I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn’t touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don’t like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with.”

Pullman’s work, of course, addresses some of the great unanswered questions of existence. However, after reading the interview, I have a new unanswered question: what, exactly, is “whiffy cheese”?

The Lyrical Terrorist has been sentenced. From the Guardian (”‘Lyrical terrorist’ sentenced over extremist poetry,” by Samina Malik):

A 23-year-old former Heathrow shop assistant who called herself the “lyrical terrorist” and scrawled her extremist thoughts on till receipts has been handed a nine-month suspended jail sentence.

Free samples.

From the Guardian (”Iranian publisher’s ruse fails to protect raunchy García Márquez title from censors,” by Robert Tait):

Iran’s straight-laced censors are not known for their tolerance of sexually risque literature, so a book called A Memory of My Melancholy Whores was never likely to meet with their approval.

But in their determination to get Gabriel García Márquez’s highly acclaimed work into the bookshops, local publishers hit on an audacious ruse - they sanitised its title.

As a result, the normally vigilant gaze of culture and Islamic guidance ministry officials was averted when a novel by the Nobel prize-winning author innocuously titled Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts was submitted and accordingly authorised for publication.

It’s a funny world. In this country, retitling a book called Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts as A Memory of My Melancholy Whores would be the best way to get people to read it.

(Read Brad Hooper’s review.)

Shirley Dent says it isn’t. And Harry Potter gets worked into the discussion. From the Guardian books blog, again (”Terrible poet, laughable terrorist“):

In his recent book, An Invitation to Terror, Professor Frank Furedi likened official responses to terrorism to that of the school kids in Harry Potter: the terrorist threat is a “Voldermort-like figure that cannot or must not be named”, and instead of identifying and giving the threat “a clear name, they prefer to castigate evil extremists and radicals who apparently hate freedom”. Bang to rights on this script in the Malik trial. The prosecution, the defence and the judge all unwittingly conspired to give Malik’s warblings about martyrdom and beheadings far, far more credence than they were due.

From the AP (”Complaint puts Texas teacher on leave,” by Angela K. Brown):

TUSCOLA, Texas - A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave - and faces possible criminal charges - after a student’s parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims’ bodies.

Kaleb Tierce, 25, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Child of God” off the list and read it.

The bad news is that Tierce was placed on leave and may face criminal charges. The good news is that parents and students seem to be supporting him. The surprising part is that he’s also a football coach.

I can’t seem to leave the New York Times site today. For instance, have you heard of “libel tourism”? Me neither. Rachel Donadio explains (”Libel Without Borders“).

And David Brooks ponders how Jack Kerouac’s On the Road went from being “a burst of rollicking, joyous American energy” to “the book you want to read if you find Sylvia Plath too upbeat” (”Sal Paradise at 50“).

Moving on to the Boston Globe, Anna Badkhen’s description of a decrepit bookmobile reminded me of Ian Sansom’s delightful Case of the Missing Books (”Bookmobiles’ final chapter?“).

And, finally: yes, Virginia, there really are banned books (”Banned Books Week: Self-Congratulatory Hype?” Galleycat).

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?

This weekend at the Philadelpha Inquirer, Carlin Romano had worthwhile takes on two issues that have spawned a lot of read-alike opinion pieces. First, banned books (”There, in the mirror - a book banner!“):

Pardon me, though, if I swing the camera this year and focus on another culprit in book banning.

The mass media.

Which books do they ban?

Scholarly books. Virtually all of them.

Second, discussing a topic–the Book Review Crisis–that most defenders have defended with brows raised high, Romano makes the only argument likely to win the executives over (”Why publishing book reviews makes sense“):

Benighted managers, we think, fail to notice that the five newspapers with the most coverage and staff devoted to books - USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post - are also the five newspapers with the highest circulations in the country.

Newspaper managers, or the marketing consultants they hire, don’t usually break out the figures that way, but they should.

The five papers mentioned all recognize that the most important task in attracting advertising is not hunting for advertisers to take ads, or expecting businesses connected to every sector of editorial content to buy advertising to support that space (i.e., book publishers should buy ads to support book pages, sports teams to support the sports section).

The trick is drawing the kind of readers, and enough of them, to one’s newspaper that advertisers (especially high-rollers) desperately want to reach. All five papers above understand that book coverage, like all coverage of what smart, successful sorts do, draws society’s most highly educated, likely-to-buy readers, a group that also skews wealthy.

A good start to Banned Books Week, which begins on Saturday (”Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books,” by Neela Banerjee, New York Times):

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 - Facing pressure from religious groups, civil libertarians and members of Congress, the federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries because they were not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

Another good start to Banned Books Week–if you can’t make it to Chicago, you’ll just have to host your own (Banned Books Week Read-Out!):

You are invited to come and celebrate your freedom to read during the 26th annual celebration of Banned Books Week. Join the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, and the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL at the Pioneer Plaza (on Michigan Ave between the Tribune Tower and the Chicago River) on Saturday, September 29, 2007, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., for the Banned Books Week Read-Out!  Local Chicago Celebrities join several acclaimed authors to read passages from their favorite banned and challenged books.  Admission is FREE.