Category Archives: Readers

Say someone just changed the words of your book because they were offended. Whether you call it censorship, expurgation, bowdlerization, or comstockery, this practice always seems so wrong…to authors. Is it ever the right thing to do?

Allow me to define what I mean by censorship. It’s the deliberate alteration of text, without the author’s permission, to make the story less offensive to the censor. This is not what a normal editor does. Editors collaborate with authors to correct errors, to make the book as good as it can be.

To me, changing the text of a book seems a little less egregious than banning the book entirely. Banning prevents readers from reading the book at all. With censorship, some version of the book’s thoughts gets transferred to readers.

Why censor at all? It’s usually for one or more of five different offenses: profanity, political, religious, racial, and sexual. Let’s call them 2P2RS for short. These five areas are likely the topics your mom told you to avoid at parties upon first meeting someone. 2P2RS can be sensitive for many people.

Throughout history, censors have altered books for each of those five reasons. They’ve taken strong curse words out and substituted mild ones. They’ve cut out the author’s political text if it’s not in keeping with government doctrine. They’ve removed religious references that cast certain organized faiths in a bad light. They’ve deleted words they interpret as racial slurs. They’ve eliminated sex scenes and altered the sexual proclivities of certain characters.

Examples are too numerous to cite, so I’ll merely mention the censorship inflicted on one work of my favorite author, Jules Verne. When translating it into English, W.H.G. Kingston cut out and rewrote much of Verne’s novel, The Mysterious Island. He likely felt the anti-British motivations of the character Prince Dakkar of India would be too objectionable to British readers, so deleted and rewrote those passages. Unfortunately, for English language readers, Kingston’s edition ended up being the predominant one for a century.

Publishers have treated the elements of 2P2RS differently over time. In the past, they permitted less sex and profanity than they do now. However, certain racial and religious slights used to be easier to publish than now. As for political censorship, that seems to vary from country to country and is roughly constant with time.

From the viewpoint of an author or a reader, a censor seems forever a villain. I can conceive of one narrow example of good censorship, but it must meet all of the following conditions. The publisher:

1. wishes to put out a children’s edition of a book, and
2. cuts out parts of the book deemed unsuitable for children while retaining as much of the essence of the story as possible, and
3. is unable to obtain the author’s consent to the necessary cuts, and
4. ensures the children’s version is clearly labeled as such on the cover, and
5. ensures that the uncut, unabridged, version of the book is on sale and available to the public.

Of course, authors sometimes make it difficult to condemn censorship entirely. Writers occasionally push the edge of the envelope on one or more of the five aspects of 2P2RS. Some are out to shock, to make a name for themselves.

Editors and publishers once kept the more scandalous and shocking 2P2RS pushes away from the public by rejecting the authors’ manuscripts. Only when they deemed the writing excellent in quality, and when they felt the public might be ready for a new boundary line, did they release such a book. In these days of self-publishing, however, those gatekeepers can no longer hold back the pressing throng of writers who recognize no 2P2RS restraints.

I’m against most censorship, other than the narrow example mentioned above. Let’s treat the public like adults. Our self-publishing era may lack gatekeepers, but it teems with readers who can post comments. Let the ideas and counter-ideas flow, says—

Poseidon’s Scribe