A better class of dirty books

It's a real bummer to love old books, but to also want your books uncensored. I'd much rather have old editions, but such ribald luminaries as Pepys and Chaucer were, not impossible, but difficult to acquire in unexpurgated editions, for a very long time. It's pretty much a given that classics for home and school, printed by major mainstream publishing houses, were edited for "taste" until well into the 1960's.

You may or may not think that this loosening up of standards was good. But cleaning up an important classic can misrepresent it. It can, in fact, make a literary icon out of a child abuser, which Samuel Pepys pretty much was, at least on one occasion. That, by the way, I learned not from my smattering of Pepys-reading, but from Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which is a terrific book on the importance and context of Pepys.

The top 2 books in the stack pictured above are typical major-publisher editions, sanitized for general public consumption; one of Pepys and one of Chaucer. Both were published by Macmillan. Sets like the Macmillan "Globe Editions" were offered by many other major publishers and buyers expected the text to be nicened up. To sell the full version to typical buyers was to invite returns, outraged letters, boycotts, and, if ordered by mail, prosecution under the Comstock laws forbidding the use of the postal service to send "obscene" literature.



This bowdlerized 1912 Modern Reader's Chaucer is worth owning for the many gorgeous illustrations alone. The editors say that they have departed from the true text:

...only to save their version from one or another of four possible stumbling blocks: rhyme and excessive rhythm, obscurity, extreme verbosity, and excessive coarseness. Their rare omission of words or short passages for the last reason has not been indicated; in the still fewer cases where a whole episode is incurably gross or voluptuous (yet Chaucer is never merely vicious), its omission is shown by asterisks.

This, I swear, is called, right there on its title page, 

The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 

If you can say nothing else good about modern morals, you have to admit that we needed to get honest about the definition of "complete."

The top book is a 1925 Pepys. LOTS of the material is included, 775 pages of double-columned small print. However, its editor has not only cleaned it up, but by the way, admonishes you for your interest in the smutty parts:

There is a certain pleasure in discovering a secret, and especially in searching, with the victim's aid, the further corners of his character. This pleasure is at bottom quite legitimate. But the same cannot be said of the Peeping Tom habit which seeks its sole entertainment in the dishabille of the diarist and his companions, and by so seeking has given his record an unenviable notoriety.

Since the full diary is multiple volumes, abridgments were the norm anyway, but while publishers were editing for length, they chose to leave out not only bad behavior but also tame and rather touching domestic information, like, the couple's yet-again failure to conceive a child, as sadly noted by Samuel when Elizabeth Pepys' menstrual period appeared.

But nice old books can sometimes be uncensored. An eBay seller offered both the Boccaccio and the Defoe, there in that stack, and made it pretty clear to potential buyers that they were unedited, by showing a couple of the illustrations.

Something tells me this isn't the
Hearth And Home Classics For Family Edification...

Learning the book business and book history is a lengthy process, but these purchases furthered my education. The Boccaccio set is an English edition "privately printed" for the Navarre Society. That got me interested in this group, but I can't find much of anything about The Navarre Society except book dealers showing what they published. And that may be the story behind them, right there. Unexpurgated literary works, probably sold by subscription to Society members. And possibly shipped in sets via other freight methods, to avoid the postal service laws.

Defoe's Roxana is a US edition, for something called the Bibliophilist Society. Also no information about them, at least under my fairly quick search, but it's a good bet that they were the same kind of organization. Publishers of works, largely literary and classical, that you couldn't get on the general market.

When I saw them on eBay I expected a buyer to grab them fast, but they stayed unpurchased long enough for me to think it over multiple times before I gave in and hit "commit to buy."

So if you're looking for tame editions, get the old editions put out by mainstream publishers. If you want the uncensored version, you'll probably want a modern edition, but if you like vintage books, you might not always need to choose between vintage and uncensored. Old and often beautiful editions from publishers who catered to the Don't snip my books! crowd are out there.