But the poster says
Paris-Vienne-Constantinople
Those woke Ottomans have a lot of explaining to do.
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Sounds like a Roger Corman’s movie.
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Constantinople? Byzantion! Those woke Romans have a lot to answer for! I insist on using the “real” name. We can’t just change things as time goes on.
Words are immutable and mean precisely what I say they do.
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I look at it this way - they’re being changed to make sure that people continue to buy them. Sales are the only consideration. That’s how the marketplace works.
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Even in the introduction to “The Third Man” the narrator talks about how he didn’t know much about Vienna prior to the post-war black market era, preferring “Constantinople” instead. It was a common name in the West for the city well into the 20th century even if it was incorrect from 1453 onward.
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That makes more sense to me. The idea of renewing copyright with just a few tweaks seemed to invalidate the idea of an end of copyright to me. Like Disney could just colorize “Steamboat Willy” and call it a day.
This is touchy, though, because you have to figure out the cutoff for what is a children’s book but also have to keep in consideration that some children will read books for adults. I worry that it could potentially lead to an argument for keeping certain books away from kids. I agree about being mindful of language in books, but my feelings about the whole of the matter are complicated.
We often fight to preserve the author’s intent, but the end result might be a compromise that we were never aware of. In these discussions we ignore the contributions, for better or worse, of publishers and editors who are also in the mix. We’re preserving the original release of a book. We don’t know how close to the author’s vision it was. What we got already may have been, for the time, more “culturally sensitive” than the author had intended it to be.
I’m fine with wanting to preserving the work as it is. The argument for artistic intent for what is ultimately a commerical work that may have been altered before print just doesn’t seem right to me.
Given that the book is set in Egypt, it sounds to me like it was comment about Arab noses looking ugly.
I absolutely agree that asshole characters should be allowed to be assholes. Things get trickier if a character’s casual racism was originally meant to be lighthearted or even sympathetic; I’d need more context about the scene and the character before making a judgment.
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And it makes it much easier to convince other entities to just pay (for example, Hollywood wants to make a movie out of Orient Express after it goes out of copyright, but because a NEW version has copyright, they just pay the publisher for movie rights even though, technically, there ARE no movie rights to purchase in the original. It is cheaper than worrying about a potential lawsuit down the road.)
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was going to say the same. editing is normal. heck, look how many times that bible thing has been rewritten. if people can change the word of god 
, changing a secular book of mystery seems totally fair too
i do think stumbling across racist slurs and tropes while trying to enjoy a book sucks ( happens in old sci fi from time to time ) and im not even the target of those slurs. 
maybe an annotated version, with the original text in an appendix, might address things better than complete erasure
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The original title and it’s effect on pop culture is why I dont read Christie.
And readers must be allowed to decide for themselves which authors are not worth reading because their content supports White supremacy.
US as well; in the early 80’s, my aunt was in a book club that sent her And Then There Were None with the original title. She complained and cancelled her subscription.
Captain Obvious says Egypt is in Africa.
Unfuck Agatha Christie, and her estate.
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Explain to me how casual racism is lighthearted or sympathetic.
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Nothing is ever a serious problem when it doesn’t affect someone directly & personally.
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First thing I think of is Cake’s version of I Will Survive.
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I think they’re trying to sell movie and TV rights, and are afraid of what happens when someone goes back and reads the originals.
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Explain to me how casual racism is lighthearted or sympathetic.
Authorial intent by a racist British person a century ago. That it (fortunately!) is no longer considered amusing is a reason why you may want to edit it out when done by a non-asshole character.
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I think it’s a foregone conclusion that un-Bowdlerized copies of Agatha Christie’s mysteries will go for premium bucks. It’s already difficult to find any of her titles in used bookstores; they sell out immediately even before the ban-hammer came down.
*looks around at the state of the world and the US specifically in regards to racism
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The myth that racism wasn’t understood/wrong “back in the day” is just that - a myth. People knew damn well it was wrong, going back centuries/millennia. It’s time we all recognize that rather than excuse it from sources we like or would like to think of as “pure.”
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They knew and they didn’t give a fuck; many still don’t.
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