Works of George Orwell Get Rewritten

George Orwell was even more prescient than we realized. He may have predicted what would happen to his own books in the age of Amazon.

The world’s largest bookseller has failed to avoid selling illegitimate books. Consequently, Orwell titles can be found at bargain prices because they were produced in India (where his work is legally in the public domain, and where standards of authenticity appear to be lax), or because they are counterfeits. Some of these editions are riddled with errors, have missing sections, or worse yet have been edited to bring them in line with current sensibilities.

Even titles get messed up:

One edition of “Animal Farm: A Fairy Story” referred to itself on the back cover as “Animals Farm: A Fair Story.” The preface referred to another great Orwell work, “Homage to Catalonia,” as “Homepage to Catalonia.”

“Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell wrote. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Today’s counterfeiters may determine what in the future Orwell will have written in the past.

The implications are straight out of Orwell.

Scott Brown, a prominent California bookseller … noted that the news was now mostly digital. “Who can really say what an article really said when it was published? There’s rarely a printed — and therefore hard-to-change — version to refer back to,” he said. “The past is becoming unmoored and unreliable.”

The same may come to apply even to literary classics. Modern versions of Winston Smith may be revising 1984 as you read this.

Orwell isn’t alone. In Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, people memorize books so that they will not be lost. Read what an Amazon reviewer has to say:

This is not the real Fahrenheit 451. The wording is different, the first chapter is not properly titled, they used the first sentence of the chapter as the title in this book. There are typo’s and spacing issues. They need to advertise that this is not an authentic book.

Sloppiness is bad enough. Revising the text to make it more politically correct is far worse. This has apparently already occurred with an unauthorized “high school edition” of Down and Out in Paris and London. An Indian version Animal Farm included this on the copyright page:

“The author respects all individuals, organizations & communities, and there is no intention in this novel to hurt any individual, organization [or] community.”

This may have been true, but Orwell never said so — at least, not until now.

On a tip from Henry B.

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