Pun Salad

So I have a reading project in progress: Ian Fleming's James Bond books. (This is number five of fourteen.) And (for some reason I don't understand myself) I want to own the books.

Complication: the edition I wound up buying (not pictured) has the bowdlerization notice up front:

This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.

I hate this. I'd prefer to read what Fleming wrote, not what some oversensitive censor thinks I should want to read instead. But the original editions were taken out of print, and their prices at Amazon (predictably) rose.

So (don't laugh) even after buying the expurgated book, I discovered that the University Near Here Library had a copy of the 1957 edition. It was very beat up, but that's what I read instead. And whenever I came across something that "might be considered offensive", I checked the new edition to see if it was altered,

Reader, I only found one "update", near the beginning of chapter 18, where Fleming decribes two "gipsy" women about to fight each other to the death. Original:

They were both gipsy-dark, with coarse black hair to their shoulders, and they were both dressed in the collection of rags you associate with shanty-town Negroes—tattered brown shifts that were mostly darns and patches.

Revised:

They were both gipsy-dark, with coarse black hair to their shoulders, and they were both dressed in the collection of rags you associate with shanty-town people—tattered brown shifts that were mostly darns and patches.

Even I can't work up a lot of dudgeon about that edit. It's unnecessary and thoughtless, but eh.

There may be other "updates", but that's the only one I found. There's plenty more to be offended by, though. See this Goodreads review from a reader who was offended by… well, nearly everything. Except for the "rampant homophobia" described here.

Not that it matters, but I also noticed the original edition had a comma in the title: From Russia, with Love. That went away in more recent printings (and the movie).

And (fun fact): James Bond doesn't show up until we're nearly 40% of the way through the book. The first part is devoted to the bad guys: SMERSH, the Russian "death to spies" agency, and its plot to kill Bond "with ignominy" employing the psychotic defector Red Grant. ("I am an expert at killing people. I do it very well. I like it.") The semi-innocent bait in their plot: the lovely Tatiana Romanova, who assures MI6 that she can deliver a "Spektor" code machine if Bond will come over to Istanbul to woo her.

I found this to be a real step up in quality compared to the first four books in the series. Although there's still way too much travelogue.