Publishers think they know what’s good for us better than we do

It was a good week for second-hand booksellers, at least. Since The Telegraph revealed last weekend that Puffin Books has been quietly rewriting Roald Dahl’s children’s stories to remove offensive terms and promote progressive attitudes, one online bookseller reported that sales of undesecrated Dahl books have risen by 600 per cent.

Now though, the tsunami of outrage that greeted the revelations – with everyone from the Queen (discreetly) to Sir Salman Rushdie to the Prime Minister expressing their displeasure – has prompted a rethink of the publisher’s priorities.

With the promise of an unadulterated “Roald Dahl Classic Collection” later this year, parents and grandparents can rest assured that they can still buy new copies of the old Dahls – that is, if they’re not boycotting the publishers over the whole debacle.

How on earth did Puffin get into this mess? I recall that when the publisher Macdonald published an extensively revised new library of Enid Blyton’s Noddy books in 1987, with golliwogs and other undesirables excised, they took care to emphasise from the start that the original versions would still be on sale at the same price as the new ones, so that customers had a choice.

What a pity that Puffin didn’t have the nous to do the same thing from the outset. (And no news yet on whether non-pc Dahl will set you back more than PC Dahl).

“We’ve listened to the debate over the past week,” said Francesca Dow of Penguin Random House in explaining the publisher’s reverse ferret. A better time to listen to it would have been in the early stages of the project – but there was no debate, because Puffin and the Dahl estate made the bizarre decision without announcing what they were doing.

Readers have been buying these new editions with no idea that they’ve been changed from the originals, I’ve long suspected that there is a yawning gap between the values of publishers and buyers unless they’ve spotted an understated reference to “reviewing the language” on the copyright page.

One can’t really believe that Puffin thought nobody would notice the changes. So, one can only suppose that the publisher somehow assumed that its customers would cheerily welcome the deletions and interpolations.

I’ve long suspected there is a yawning gap between the values of Britain’s publishers and those of the people who buy their books – and I have a feeling that if we compare the sales of the new Dahl books and the nasty unedited ones in a year or so, that will furnish further evidence.

There has always been something of the we-know-what’s-good-for-youbetter-than-you-do about Puffin, which used to boast publicly in the 1950s that it would never stoop to publishing Enid Blyton. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have been much surprised if any UK children’s publisher had done something similar and been equally wrongfooted by the outcry.