Quote:
Originally Posted by elaysee
I believe John Curran's Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making mentions examples, or at least I can't imagine where else I would have read the assertion. As I recall Curran describing it, a couple of Christie's novels were serialized in the UK and the American editions published from the (shorter) serialized version, with some resultant damage to the overall characterization. Curran indicated that these American editions continue to descend from the serials.
I believe one of the books was The Moving Finger, though I can't recall the second. I picked up a UK edition of The Moving Finger last year, but haven't yet gotten to making a comparison with the US edition.
I would assume UK<->US edition changes beyond spelling are rare if only for editing cost reasons, but I found this story interesting and believable.
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One thing to consider is that until fairly recently, the US didn't recognize foreign copyright. Thus, one of the first editions of LOTR's in the US was not authorized. In such cases, I'm sure it's not unheard of for publishers to take all sorts of liberties with the original text. IMPO, the mere act of publishing an unauthorized edition shows that one doesn't exactly respect the author or text much.