Books and Magazines News

Hungarian authorities have fined a bookseller for selling a British graphic novel without closed wrapping - saying it breached an anti-gay law on LGBT literature for under-18s.

The retailer was fined 12m forints (£27,400), for selling Heartstopper without wrapping it in plastic foil, as required by law. Officials said the book depicts homosexuality and was sold to minors.

In 2021, the government of prime minister Viktor Orban introduced a law banning the display and promotion of homosexuality among under-18s. The censorship laws says that minors cannot be shown pornographic content, or anything that encourages gender change or homosexuality.

The Heartstopper series of books, written and illustrated by the British author Alice Oseman, follow the lives of two British teenagers attending a fictional school who meet and fall in love. It is billed as a book about life, love, and everything that happens in between. It has since been acquired and adapted by the streaming service Netflix, which plans to release a second series in August.

Tim Minchin, the comedian behind the Matilda musical, has described editing Roald Dahl's books to better suit modern audiences as a slippery slope . The British-Australian composer and entertainer, who wrote the music for the musical based on Dahl's book, said removing outdated language in the author's works set a precedent for needing to change all texts that might offend people and warned they could need to be constantly updated to keep up with changing sensibilities. He explained in an interview with the Guardian's Saturday magazine:

It seems there's an incredible slippery slope problem with editing texts,  I mean, my initial reaction, when I heard about it? 'Now we'll have to get all the rapes out of all the history books. Then the world will be a better place.'

It's not actually about morality. It's about keeping the property, owned by the Dahls and Netflix, contemporary --  It's an interesting part of modern progressivism, that a huge amount of change is happening because corporations have identified where their bottom-line is best served.

Problem one, as I see it: If you do this once, you'll have to do it to all texts ever, taking out all the words that might upset people.

Problem two: You'll have to change it all again in five years when the new words you put in are out of vogue. So that's two slippery-slope problems. You're standing at the top of a double slide. And now you're spraying soap on the fucking things, he said.

Jeeves and Wooster books have been censored to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed unacceptable by the publishers, Penguin.

Original passages in the editions of the comic novels published since 2022 have been purged or reworked. These censored editions can also be identified by a disclaimer reading:

Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.

In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.

Wodehouse has become the latest author to have their work altered, after novels by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie were purged of words deemed at odds with modern sensitivities.

In the 1934 novel Right Ho, Jeeves , a racial term used to describe a minstrel of the old school has been removed.

In Thank You, Jeeves , whose plot hinges on the performance of a minstrel troupe, numerous racial terms have been removed or altered, both in dialogue spoken by the characters in the book, and from first-person narration in the voice of Bertie.

 

Offsite Comment: How dare they rewrite PG Wodehouse?

17th April 2023. See article from spiked-online.com by Simon Evans

No one has the right to meddle with his pristine and perfect prose.