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Anyway, last week Vintage Books in the UK published three new hardback editions of Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and Goldfinger. They have very nice art, much superior to the paperbacks in my opinion. Also there is new introductory material plus some reproductions of Fleming’s correspondence at the back.
I just got my copies from WHSmith today and they are well worth £9 each or whatever it was I paid. RRP £12.99.
So apologies if there is a more suitable thread.
Thanks for the update, @Chevron. I was not really aware of these reproductions.
Sounds like I need to add these to the collection then!
Not sure if they are doing the other books in a similar design, but I saw the above featured in some literary Bond articles on the MI6 HQ main page.
Thanks. Nice site. The archive material at the back has sold me on these!
What is the new name?
A damn shame, and this seems to be the operating procedure for the republishing of old literature with "sensitive" language these days. Because removing uncomfortable terms and ideas will really teach us why they existed in the first place and not at all hide us from the mistakes of the past that we can remake again (massive sarcasm alert).
I am proud to own the centenary Ian Fleming Penguin editions of the Bond books published in 2008 that do not censor any of Fleming's original works and allow you to experience the texts as the first readers did half a decade ago. A simple thing, perhaps, but in an age when everyone from Fleming to Mark Twain are having their work altered to fit a present day motivation, simply reading books as they were meant to be experienced is a great privilege.
Is it 'Fifth Avenue' now, as in the old US editions of LALD? That means the 'race edits' are creeping into the UK editions now too I suppose. I know it's an offensive word and all but it is after all the name of a book by Harlem Renaissance author Carl Van Vechten that Fleming was referring to.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_Heaven
I wonder if they've censored Leiter referring to the (original) chapter title in he and Bond's dialogue as well, or if they left it alone and instead chose to only censor the obvious chapter title that is more overt. I think they'll probably censored all of it, though.
With how tensions are rising with the west and North Korea, GF will be censored next!
I've got to go out now, but can anyone else check this? Page 56 of the new edition.
Changing a chapter title is one thing, deleting three whole pages of text is another. I'm not pleased about that one bit.
We should probably make a detailed list of offending editions so that unsuspecting Bond fans don't waste their $$ buying them.
Sounds like the US 'race edits' to me. A pity. These are historical novels and the British editions should be left as they were originally published, offensive or note as they may be. This is surely a retrograde step.
So it's not like they're just now censoring the book from a 21st century standpoint.
The edition contains "A Note on the text" which I quote:
"Hart [American editor] suggested several edits, which Fleming approved, to delete passages he felt were racially insensitive, even for the 1950s."
"Based on Fleming's letters it appears he very likely preferred many of these edits to the original British version."
"With input from the Fleming family and literary experts, we have examine these differences in order to construct what we believe could have been Fleming's preferred text for Live and Let Die." "It is by no means a bowdlerisation."
It is signed by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. and Vintage Classics, 2017.
Yikes, @shamanimal, that's a real shame. Makes you wonder what else has been ripped from the book in the name of PC censorship.
I just took out my edition of L&LD to check on this and compare, and the content removed in your text from chapter five comes on page 41 for me, where Felix starts talking to Bond about the black culture of New York.
It seems the new edition you have cuts everything exactly after the line "It isn't a bad life when it consists of sitting in a comfortable bar drinking good whisky," a sentence that is followed by Felix name-dropping "Nigger Heaven" to Bond, which explains why the rest of the dialogue was cut. However, the cuts go on beyond that and remove the entire dialogue of a black man and woman in Bond and Felix's midst, who are having a lover's spat during which the black man says the n-word himself and where each are given what could be seen as an offensive dialogue to the sensitive people of today. So, you were right: a good two or two-and-a-half pages are removed from the original writing of Fleming in the chapter, depending on your edition, font size and page layout, etc.
That really ticks me off, frankly. There's nothing in the dialogue that warrants such heavy cuts. Felix uses the n-word, yes, but he names a book with that name and doesn't call anyone it, nor does the ensuing dialogue between the black man and woman carry any demeaning or critical statement about the culture. It's simply a couple arguing quite comedically about how they will spend their night, and Bond's conclusion at the end is an amusing and carefree one. He doesn't degrade the man or woman, or cast them out in an impolite way. He says, "Seems they're interested in much the same things as everyone else-sex, having fun, and keeping up with the Joneses. Thank God they're not genteel about it."
It's a pretty relaxed and frivolous chapter, and that section is concluded with Bond not only finding the black culture to be like everyone else in the world (a message of egalitarianism if you want to call it that), but also has him positively praising that the man and woman he overhears aren't restraining themselves to fit a societal rule of behavior to cramp their fun.
As usual, the censoring seems to be a knee-jerk response and not one that has anything to do with the actual context or content of the text. The publisher simply saw "Nigger" in the chapter and said, "Oh no, that must go, we can't have kids reading that," and on and on, ignoring the way it's used or the context of its use and everything else. Utterly pointless.
If this publisher covers Diamonds Are Forever they'll probably cut an entire section of the mud-bath chapter where Bond recalls Felix discussing Big (where the n-word is used again) and who knows what else from the remaining books. Will Honey be rewritten as being fully clothed in a parka when Bond first meets her in Dr. No in order to stop her from seeming objectified to little girls and boys (despite the fact that Fleming never actually does this anyway)? Will the dinner conversation between Bond and Kerim be cut from From Russia with Love where rape is mentioned? What of the lesbian content in the early chapters of the same book where Klebb tries to seduce Tatiana? We wouldn't want kids to think that all lesbians were evil after reading that chapter, heaven forbid.
Someone should check to see if the Korean related content in Goldfinger is still there because judging by how L&LD was treated I can't see these kinds of things remaining in the edition:
Those who have the new edition of Casino Royale should also see if Bond's reference to "the sweet tang of rape" in relation to Vesper at the end of the chapter "Tide of Passion" is still in the book as well.
If as @Some_Kind_Of_Hero says , that these are actually how the original American editions were published, then that sort of mitigates things, in that the original American editions, were heavily redacted.
This is not good, but if they were, they were.
I was not aware that American editions were sanitized.
My Fleming collection is a hodge podge of '60s '70s and '80s paperbacks, none of which are sanitized.
I guess that this is because they are Cdn editions, which may be the same as the British editions.
I was referring to the chapter title change. The other three pages I've just learned about. It sounds like these other edits were not missing in the original American version, but had been approved by Fleming nonetheless and that his letters indicate he actually preferred these edits.
Odd that Fleming would have been overruled back in the day, especially if he was ok with the edits.
If the edits are new though, then it does smack of pc redaction, despite what Fleming supposedly may have been agreeable to 60 years ago
Which states explicitly that it is not a bowdlerization—or "pc redaction"—but based off Fleming's approvals and letters and done with input from the family and literary experts and signed by Fleming Publications.
It's true that LALD was edited for the American market--I grew up reading the 80s Berkley Edition which had the exact same edits as those described above (along with others like eliminating "except when they've drunk too much" after "Pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought").
However, I'm a little skeptical about whether Fleming "likely preferred many of these edits to the original British version." First, the letters where he supposedly makes this clear are not available--I don't recall reading them in The Man With the Golden Typewriter. And if Fleming preferred the American edits, why didn't he incorporate them into the British versions? My guess is that Fleming was eager for American sales and agreed to any edits (or even retitlings) suggested by American editors. But the original, English editions were probably the ones closest to him.
Had Fleming agreed to edit the editions sold in his homeland, I would be less skeptical.
Without access to the letters, I guess it's hard to tell for sure—you just have their word to go on. But wouldn't the British edition of L&LD have gone to print before the American edition? Perhaps even before Fleming was presented these edit suggestions for the American edition?