[alpinisme]

Nobody in this thread has said the book is racist. The question was whether you can see the motivation of retitling from a publishers (or for that matter booksellers) perspective. If you want people to buy the book, the old name is a turn off whether the content is raciest or not.

[aleph_minus_one]

> If you want people to buy the book, the old name is a turn off whether the content is raciest or not.

This depends on the audience. For some people it is a turn off to adopt the title to a woke zeitgeist.

[alpinisme]

You’re right of course. Some people will buy the non-woke title as a protest vote of sorts. And others will go out of their way to get an old copy out of a non-political sense of loyalty (some of these people were already buying the book as a historical object though and would have preferred a used copy to start).

But it is not just about people buying the book knowing it changed, or buying it because it changed. It’s about coming across a title like that cold, without knowing any context. (Remember: the aspiration of a publisher is always to have the book become more popular with new formerly uninterested audiences). It’s an empirical question whether that title will do better than a retitle but my money is on the title without the most fraught words in the English language on the cover.

[brendoelfrendo]

Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society.

It is, if nothing else, convenient that I don't have to say one of the worst slurs in American English every time I discuss Agatha Christie's body of work.

It's worth noting that, for that reason, the book was released as "And Then There Were None" in its first US edition in 1940; the use of the original title until 1985 is a UK thing.

[GJim]

> who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society.

Nobody is wishing they had a more prominent place today, nor in the future. Rather, there is a need not to edit the past, lest we forget it.

> "And Then There Were None" in its first US edition in 1940; the use of the original title until 1985 is a UK thing.

I suggest that is because in the USA, particularly in the south, political sensitivities about such a title would be difficult to overcome and the association with an old British poem would be completely lost.

[bloak]

> the association with an old British poem

Wait, are you sure about that? Wikipedia says "an 1869 minstrel song". I had assumed it was a song from the USA that happened to be fairly well known in Britain.

Also I have the impression that the word "nigger" is not traditional in British English. The first time I came across the word was when reading Mark Twain. I had previously heard several words used for referring to darker-skinned people but not that one. Of course that's just my experience from one part of the country.

[pessimizer]

> Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society.

As a black American, I'm forced to care about the efforts of people to retcon pervasive racism out of history, or relegate it to one-dimensional "bad guys." This will not save my children from racism, instead it will make them absolutely bewildered by the pervasive racism they will face, and make them blame themselves.

Rewriting crimes out of history does not help victims, it helps perpetrators.

[brendoelfrendo]

Perhaps this will make my willingness to alter a title seem somewhat arbitrary, but I do agree on the whole. I don't think that media should be edited to remove racist or otherwise outmodded content; for example, I would never suggest altering the language of Huckleberry Finn, or the racist content found in some classic Looney Tunes. We can and should be forced to reckon with the history of racism, and our children should be taught context alongside content. Perhaps what got me in this instance is the use of modern "woke" terminology to refer to, in the case of Agatha Christie's novel, a decision that was made decades ago. Further, I don't think it's correct to assume that all editorial decisions are made in pandering to the "woke zeitgeist," whatever that means.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Yeah but I tend not to care about the opinions of people who wish racial slurs had a more prominent place in modern society.

But I do tend to care about the opinions of people who wish that works of the past are not manipulated to fit the current zeitgeist - in particular if it is claimed or suggest that this is the work as written by the author.