It's better to leave them in obscurity...

Harlequin has published a collection of Harlequin Vintage books from 60 years ago. Great. These could be valuable for lots of reasons...teachers of writing could use them for examples, my mom could re-read books she read a long time ago...who knows? Unfortunately, I was pointed to the Harlequin page by @mikecane and found the article about this effort, which included the quote below:


Now for the books: Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

WTF?! Harlequin has been in FAIL mode lately, first with the Vanity Press and now with deliberate censorship. I am not a proponent of mass boycott, any more than I am a proponent of mass anything, but I am not going to patronize them.

also posted to Circulating Zen and LiveJournal (barbarakitten_t)