Don’t Mess with Texts

As The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig noted this week:

The Washington Post, in an editorial, has come out against revisions to decades-old novels. One of the editorial’s prime examples is Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die.

The Post’s editorial said such changes are “a threat to free expression, to historical honesty and, indeed, to readers themselves for contemporary editors to comb through works of fiction written at different moments and rewrite them for today’s mind-set, particularly with little explanation of process or limiting principles.” …

“The trend raises uncomfortable questions about authorship and authenticity, and it ignores the reality that texts are more than consumer goods or sources of entertainment in the present ... They are also cultural artifacts that attest to the moment in which they were written—the good and the bad.”

You can read the full Washington Post editorial here.