Publishing Lite

[pegkerr]

Saw this in the news today:

To howls of indignation from literary purists, a leading publishing house is slimming down some of the world’s greatest novels.

Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere "padding," but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions.

The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads "in half the time," will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.

Malcolm Edwards, publisher of Orion Group, said that the idea had developed from a game of "humiliation," in which office staff confessed to the most embarrassing gaps in their reading. He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dick several times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.

What was more, he said: "We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones."

Research confirmed that "many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long." [emphasis added]. [Good god, if that's their attitude, then I hope this publishing concern fails miserably]

The first six titles in the Compact Editions series, all priced at £6.99, are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters.

Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady will follow in September.

Each has been whittled down to about 400 pages by cutting 30 to 40 per cent of the text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and, in a few cases, chapters have been removed.

Matthew Crockatt, of the London independent bookshop Crockatt & Powell, poured scorn on the enterprise. "It’s completely ridiculous — a daft idea," he said.

"How can you edit the classics? I’m afraid reading some of these books is hard work, which is why you have to develop as a reader. If people don’t have time to read Anna Karenina, then fine. But don’t read a shortened version and kid yourself it’s the real thing."

A rival classics publisher, quoted in The Bookseller magazine, accused Orion of dumbing down. "It’s patronising to consumers. One of the striking things about a huge number of the classics is how readable and approachable they are. Just making them shorter doesn’t make them more palatable."

Readers should be trusted to self-edit by skimming passages: "Aren’t readers intelligent enough to do that?" Read more

I won't be buying any, needless to say. I don't want to read a gutted version of a classic book. Yes, there are some books on this list I've struggled to get through--I did abandon Mill on the Floss, although I did finish and enjoy Middlemarch, but I like much better using the Daily Lit approach. The book seems too big and overwhelming? Then just read a little bit each day via e-mail. That is how I am now reading Moby Dick and Bleak House.

Comments

[morganmuffle]

After I posted that comment and read some of the others it occured to me that my kneejerk reaction probably had more to do with the awfully selfish "if i had to wade my way through the whole thing then why should you get out of it" reaction which probably isn't the most helpful one in the world.

That and a rabid hatred of badly cut books *doesn't metion the Chalet School paperbacks*

Still I read some of the classics in child-friendly versions when I was younger and I suppose this is along similar lines but somewhere inside I still feel it's a cop-out...

[folk.livejournal.com]

Heh, quite. And I certainly agree that badly cut books are worse than part-skimming the originals. But done well — whether in dead tree form, on the interbigweb supernetworld, or on film — I'm very fond of editing wordy literature.

...thinking about it, I wonder if there's an online-edited version of LOTR, to take out some of what I end up referring to as "In This Section, Tolkien Brags About His Mad World Creating Skillz OR Some Odd Language He Made Up".