When I was a kid, I loved reading all the reissued novels in the late ’60s that featured the adventures of Doc Savage and other pulp heroes. One of the things I liked the most was that sense of time travel; that is, experiencing a story from another era. Which is why when I came across a Spider reprint that had been updated—I think the vintage of a bottle of wine was of a date which had come after the original story had been published—I felt cheated. <\/p>\n
Didn’t the publisher realize it was eliminating one of the things that had attracted me to the book in the first place?<\/p>\n
Based on how Wikipedia<\/a> recounts what happened, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:<\/p>\n It seems likely that these four books were edited and modernized reprints, one of several reasons why they may have never caught on with their intended audience. In one, Death and the Spider<\/em>, with an original publishing date of 1940, Nita Van Sloan is shown driving an Jaguar E-type X-KE, a sportscar not created and on the streets until 1961, some nineteen years later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was even more offended when I learned that James Schmitz had been edited in rerelease to eliminate numerous references to smoking, which later came up at a World Fantasy Con panel I was on during which I, without realizing it, ended up sitting next to the guy who was responsible for that expurgation. (You can check out the discussion—and see the flabbergasted Nancy Kress—starting at 11:56 here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n