Miss Teen Wordpower
A couple of weeks ago I was browsing a local thrift store, buying up cheap paperbacks like Melville's Billy Budd and old childhood favorites like E.B. White's Trumpet Of The Swan and Judy Blume's Otherwise Known As Sheila The Great, and just now I was about to relax with Sheila The Great and relive a favorite story of mine from since about 1979, when I was right around the same age as the protagonist herself.
As I was going over all of Sheila's familiar inner monologue, I got to Page 6 and read this:
"I went into the living room then. My mother was reading a book. The CD player was on and my sister Libby was twirling around in her pink tow slippers."
The CD player? I flipped to the front of the book and I only saw one copyright for 1972. I'm not quite sure how all that works, but I'm assuming that this is not really a first edition paperback, am I correct? And if they went through to make changes like, oh say, magically transforming a record player into a CD player, wouldn't there be another printer's date? Or at least a notation about such alterations at the beginning of the book?
And not that I've re-bought much of my old favorite books from childhood, but has this been a trend that I wasn't aware of? Tweaking words hither and yon to make old classics seem oddly anachronistic in order for kids today to relate? Let me guess, the further I read, they'll have Sheila typing out her newspaper on a Macbook while still printing them out on a mimeograph.
Does this mean that all references to Louis Armstrong in The Trumpet Of The Swan will be switched to... um.... (scratches head) Louis Farrakhan? I got nuthin'.
As I was going over all of Sheila's familiar inner monologue, I got to Page 6 and read this:
"I went into the living room then. My mother was reading a book. The CD player was on and my sister Libby was twirling around in her pink tow slippers."
The CD player? I flipped to the front of the book and I only saw one copyright for 1972. I'm not quite sure how all that works, but I'm assuming that this is not really a first edition paperback, am I correct? And if they went through to make changes like, oh say, magically transforming a record player into a CD player, wouldn't there be another printer's date? Or at least a notation about such alterations at the beginning of the book?
And not that I've re-bought much of my old favorite books from childhood, but has this been a trend that I wasn't aware of? Tweaking words hither and yon to make old classics seem oddly anachronistic in order for kids today to relate? Let me guess, the further I read, they'll have Sheila typing out her newspaper on a Macbook while still printing them out on a mimeograph.
Does this mean that all references to Louis Armstrong in The Trumpet Of The Swan will be switched to... um.... (scratches head) Louis Farrakhan? I got nuthin'.
posted by Melissa at 7:37 PM
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