Dahlmageddon canceled: Publisher to continue printing original versions too

Francesca Dow, MD of Penguin Random House Children’s: "We’ve listened to the debate over the past week which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation."

— Cameron Walker (@CameronDLWalker) February 24, 2023

[Good, I suppose, but still unnecessary. Anyone who finds Dahl’s work offensive can choose not to read it at all. Or much of anything else in literature either, by extension. Bowdlerization is an accommodation for idiots, but at least the originals will remain available for sale in parallel. As Mark Hemingway says on Twitter, the contrast will be fun to watch. — Ed]

This will be a fun experiment — comparing the sales of the censored versions to the sales of the originals.

I would also be curious to see if the marketing and/or distribution of the two different versions compares. https://t.co/uwIqAtjGZc

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) February 24, 2023