Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone is undoubtedly
a cultural phenomenon. It has also a very interesting publication story. In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher's Stone with an
initial print-run of 500 copies in hardback, three hundred of which were
distributed to libraries. The first
edition was shorter than further ones and had only 223 pages. Some short parts
of text were not published because the editor needed to lower the costs of
publication.
One Year
later Scholastic Corporation bought the U.S. rights to publish the book in the United
States. Of course there were some changes
in publication text, for example the edition was
published as a Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone, but the American
editor had more confidence in book success and publish all J.K. Rowling's text in first edition.
In
few countries (for example Germany)
translation was based on first British edition of book and some parts of text
simply don't exists. The most important missing sentence in this translation
was - “Thomas, Dean,” a black boy even taller than Ron, joined Harry at the
Gryffindor table.
Naturally some people assumed that deleting these from
Harry Potter und der Stein
der Weisen sentence was a
form of racism. Professor Jefferson Fish contacted even with Rowling's literary Agent. The Agent explained
that the sentence was deleted by British publisher in space-saving edit and
change was not related to Thomas Dean's skin color. Skin Color of Dean Thomas Dean's skin color
was not changed in the German edition because German translator never saw these
sentence in his text.
References:
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1) Harry Potter ja tarkade
kivi (Estonian edition);
2) Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone;
3) J. M. Fish, Harry Potter
and the Racial Misunderstanding [in:] The Myth of Race, 2013, s. 43.
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