Thursday, September 16, 2010

Stupid Thing of the Week

In my fruitless attempts to decrease brain entropy and expand my horizons, I'm trying to read books. You know, like people did in the olden days. To facilitate this, I picked up several paperbacks at the used bookshop last week (knowing I would probably never end up reading them all).

Well, I started the book yesterday, and I was horrified to discover that someone--a previous owner--had gone through and bowdlerized it with a pen, scribbling out words and entire passages (sometimes doing so so zealously that the ink spilled through to the opposite page.
Sigh.
I just don't get this editor's mindset, either. For example, on page 62 and 63, we find such potentially-offensive words as "Fat prick," "My God," "Little faggot," and "Die, bitch," but what has been crossed out are the words "shitty" and a sequence where a character urinates in the bushes. Most puzzling, the word "pee" was crossed out and, I kid you not, the word "sneeze" written in its place, so the sentence becomes, "Alert and excited, and needing to sneeze, Doring held the weighty Mauser, so many years carried and now to be used." It would be amusing if it weren't so sad.

3 comments:

JMPerkins said...

Poor deluded would be censorer... thus far in life I've only seen useful and or at least interesting notes in my used paperbacks.

Abigail Hilton said...

That is sad and hilarious!

Anonymous said...

Imagine if he stumbled across this blog. He'd try to use pen on his screen, have a coronary and die.