Prophets veiled and unveiled: should publishers act as censors?

 

The appalling assault suffered by Salman Rushdie set me thinking, as a former publisher, about censorship. In a sense, the job of a publisher is both to resist censorship and to exercise censorial judgements. A publisher might refuse to publish a work for a variety of reasons. For example, my last employer, Thames & Hudson, published illustrated non-fiction with a strong emphasis on art, architecture, design, history and archaeology. A T&H editor would therefore speedily decline a novel or, for example, a very specialist work about economics.

 

Books had to be financially viable. When I worked in the academic division of Macmillan large numbers of book costings crossed my desk daily. There was no time for deep reflection about all bar a few, so snap judgements were made about sales. Provided the gross margin (sales less fixed costs such as production costs) was no lower than 50%, the book was considered viable. And if it comfortably exceeded 50% the book was likely a real winner. A trade publisher (of books for a general consumer market such as novels, cookbooks, popular history and so on) would base judgements about books on other factors. There were, of course, financial criteria, notably whether the advance demanded by the author’s agent might earn out (that is, earn royalties sufficient to offset the advance). The editor would also consider whether a book would improve the list already contracted for a future season, whether it appeals to a current fashion or interest, the existing competition, the potential of future books that the author planned to write etc.

 

A commissioning editor’s background, experience and personal prejudices or ignorance also plays a role. In 1985, to my shame, I challenged a colleague who wanted to publish a book by the feminist author Terri Apter, Why Women Don’t Have Wives, because I could not understand why anybody would buy the book. My colleague was outraged. He explained to me exactly why the book would sell – and it did. In the 1990s a colleague at The Dictionary of Art met, in a Welsh pub, a man who had written a “Watership Down novel about badgers.” The aspiring author asked my colleague whether Macmillan would publish it. I, in turn, asked the managing director of Macmillan’s trade division for her opinion. “No market in badgers”, she replied instantly. She turned out to be very wrong: the pub landlord published the book, it became a bestseller in Wales and Penguin bought paperback rights for a large sum. Unfortunately, the landlord concluded that it was easy to make money from books (it is not), published the next novel and it flopped.

 

Listening to the news coverage of Rushdie’s stabbing, I hear a writer comment that The Satanic Verses would be unpublishable nowadays. He noted that, until now, only publishers had been attacked and, in some cases murdered, so publishers are understandably reluctant to risk their lives. Religiously-inspired censorship comes in many guises. In the 1990s, when I was publisher of The Dictionary of Art (now The Grove Dictionary of Art), I took decisions not to publish a variety of texts and/or images. The example that immediately sprang to mind when I heard the news about Mr Rushdie was that of the images of the Prophet. Our Islamic art editors, my good friends Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, emailed me to tell me that their new edition of the Pelican History of Islamic Art had been returned by the publisher’s Pakistan distributor because the image on the cover was a painting that depicted the Prophet. The distributor explained that, if he sold the book, he risked being executed. Sheila and Jonathan advised me to check how many images of the Prophet would be included in my not-yet-published reference work.

 

Muhammad at Mlunt Hira, 16th-century Ottoman illustration of the Siyer-i Nebi

I checked and there were plenty. I contacted our senior adviser on Islamic Art, Oleg Grabar at Harvard. After examining our selection of images Oleg explained to me that the common notion that Islamic principles have always prohibited representations of the human form is not correct. There are many important paintings and illustrated manuscripts produced in Islamic societies that depict humans. However, for many contemporary Muslim populations the depiction of the Prophet is a very sensitive subject. Moreover, there are two ways of depicting he Prophet: veiled and unveiled. The former is much less controversial than the latter. So, we considered the images one-by-one. If an image of a veiled Prophet served just as well as an unveiled depiction, we replaced the unveiled image with a veiled one. However, in some cases an unveiled Prophet was the only option, other than leaving the text unillustrated. We considered such cases on individual merits. If the work illustrated was not especially significant and the text made sense without an illustration, then we removed the image. However, some images were so important to the history of Islamic art that it was simply absurd not to illustrate them: so those illustrations remained.

 

Erotic art raised comparable questions. The author of an article about the history of erotic art asked for a large number of illustrations because such works were not liberally illustrated elsewhere in the Dictionary. His selection worried me, so I met with two senior colleagues whose judgement I trusted. We decided, in the words of one colleague, that some images “Will have us banned in Saudi Arabia”, while other would not. As it happened, this issue applied not only in countries such as Saudi Arabia and not only on account of Islamic sensibilities. A salesman complained to me one day that he had lost a big sale (and his commission) to a Baptist college in the American South because there was an entry on homoerotic art. This was not a question of illustrations, since the librarian at the college had not yet seen the article in question. She explained that her college simply prohibited the very mention of gay love in any context and therefore the students could not be exposed to any book which referred to the topic, even in the case of a 32-volume work in which homoerotic art was discussed in only a few pages.

 

Similar problems were not uncommon in the USA. One day in the early 2000s I was walking to an appointment at Brigham Young University (a Mormon institution) when I bumped into a very distressed salesman from the company that distributed my books. He was worried that he would lose a large sale of an expensive textbook, Art Since 1900, over one image: of a performance artist Lynda Benglis (1941-). The photo depicted a nude Benglis inserting a phallic object into herself. The art history professor explained that his students would simply refuse to read a book that included that image. The salesman had suggested that the books be sold to the college bookstore non-returnable and that the store employees could simply sticker the offending image, but this did not work because the bookstore workers were also Mormon and would not look at the image to ensure that they stickered the correct spot. Our salesman wanted me to persuade the professor to accept the image (I failed miserably). Alternatively, he wanted my company to sticker the offending item. In other words, to censor one of its own books. The company rightly refused.

 

On another visit, to a college in Phoenix, I met a professor who taught an introductory course called Stones and Bones: an introduction to palaeontology and evolution. He explained to me that many of his students were Mormons. I expressed surprise that the students would take a class that contradicted their beliefs. The professor explained that after every class the students took their notes to the local student Mormon centre where they were told what was and was not true according to Mormon beliefs. They were allowed to repeat these untruths in exams to get good grades, but should otherwise ignore them. Some of my competitors pandered to Mormon and evangelical Christian objections to Christianity by including in their textbooks a discussion of Creationism, presented as a valid dissenting theory. I had no difficulty in deciding that I would not lower my standards to this level in my books.

 

Government bodies have sometimes asked me to censor books. Much of my work on The Ditctionary of Art was carried out during the period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. This gave us the opportunity to commission Russian scholars whose work was unknown in the West, but elements of the Soviet system persisted. The Soviet copyright agency VAAP insisted that I sign a contract with them: they would then commission authors on my behalf. However, the draft contract contained a provision that all articles about Russian/Soviet artists be “examined” by VAAP. I refused and VAAP failed to insist on that provision.

 

The Dictionary escaped censorship in Iran, thanks to a resourceful bookseller. I noticed that we had made a gratifyingly large sale to Iran, given the large number of images of nude or partially nude bodies in the book. I asked the salesperson how it came about. Iranian regulations required that a government agency read all foreign books before they could be sold in Iran. The bookseller explained to the agency that this was a very large book indeed: many millions of words in English. Did the government officials really want to read so much? Opting for the easy life, the agency permitted the importation of the book without so much as looking at it.

 

On one occasion, the British Council asked me to censor an author’s work, but on this occasion in a good cause. We had commissioned some articles on Romanian art from the director of the national art museum in Bucharest. Shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, I received a letter from the director explaining that he would be delayed because his office had come under fire and the consequent fire had consumed his texts. I was about to write a sympathetic reply, when a second letter arrived from Bucharest with a covering letter from the British Council office in the capital. The second letter was from the art historian who had replaced the director and who explained that our author was a creature of the Ceausescu regime whose work should not be published. A group of Romanian scholars offered to write new texts. The British Council’s letter convinced me that in this case the replacement authors would supply a more reliable text.

 

Government censorship is as old as the book, of course, and sometimes very Heath Robinson. For a time, I was publisher of a venerable reference work, The Statesman’s Yearbook (SYB). Our Indian sales rep told me that every year sales of the book were delayed in India while officials censored any mention of Kashmir being part of Pakistan. She sent me a photocopy of censored pages. Somewhere in India, an official with a very high threshold for boredom carefully examined the book, obliterating with felt tip pens any indication that Pakistani Kashmir exists and redrawing the maps of Pakistan and India accordingly. The sales rep explained that sales would be made much faster if we removed the text ourselves and redrew the maps. I refused because censorship would be a disservice to readers and because the reputation of the SYB as an authoritative source would have been undermined. I could not stop the Indian authorities persisting in local censorship, but that did not justify censoring the book myself.

 

Another book was the subject of attempted censorship by a printer on behalf of a government. The second edition of my (very successful) textbook Gateways to Art included a new text and image about Ai Weiwei. The printer in China refused to print a book which even mentioned Ai Weiwei. My production director gave me two choices: replace the piece about the dissident artist or switch the printing to Malaysia at higher cost. We printed in Malaysia.

 

On the other hand, I exercised a degree of censorship in Gateways to Art. An author included a discussion of Jenny Saville, an artist known for her nude self-portraits depicting her body using very foreshortened views. The author chose a particular work which depicted Saville’s genitals quite clearly, which I thought would result in the book being rejected in more conservative parts of the USA. Since Saville painted several similar works which were slightly less explicit, but illustrated the point the author wanted to make perfectly well, I persuaded the author to change the choice of illustration. 

 

Copyright can at times be used to exercise censorship. For the first edition of Gateways to Art I wanted to illustrate a work which became famous when mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani attempted to shut down an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. The exhibition, Sensation, included several contentious works, but the one which attracted Giuliani’s ire was Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a work that included elephant dung and collaged photos of women’s buttock cut from pornographic magazines. This work has been reproduced in a number of publications. However, the artist’s representative decided on this occasion that it was overexposed and refused permission to reproduce it. We rewrote the text and illustrated it with another controversial work: Marc Quinn’s self-portrait head made of his frozen blood. Nevertheless, the change of image lost me a large sale at a college in Albuquerque, because the faculty decided that I had censored Ofili’s work. They refused to adopt a book of a publisher who censored artworks.

 

Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996

On another occasion, the representative of Diane Arbus granted permission to reproduce some of her photos on the condition that any reference in the text to her committing suicide be removed from the text. It was made clear that even if we did not illustrate any works by Arbus in the text, the author would never in future be given permission to reproduce any of her images. This, in effect, would prevent the author from pursuing his research and would damage his career. Much as I disliked censoring the text, I felt that I could not risk damaging the author’s future, so with his agreement the text was rewritten and the permission granted.

 

Diane Arbus, Untitled, 1970-1971

In other words, a publisher makes judgements on a regular basis about what should be published. In general, the publisher’s instincts should, of course, be to resist censorship. A publisher’s judgement of the potential and the financial viability of a book inevitably influences the decision to publish or not, but those judgements are never infallible and a good publisher will often find a way to make a book work against the odds if it is sufficiently important. The publisher’s job is to exercise judgement to ensure that as few restrictions as possible inhibit publication of research, opinions, facts and scholarship. If a degree of censorship is prudent or inescapable, it is often possible to find an alternative solution which does not damage the free flow of ideas and scholarship.

 

Of course, none of the decisions I took over the years required anything like the courage required of Salman Rushdie and his publishers.