Mine certainly are. There ought to be at least a couple someplace in the house, but I can’t find them.
I may well do so eventually; probably while looking for something else.
I had almost all the early editions of the Hardy Boys books as a teenager in the seventies (mostly from used bookstores, a couple of hand-me-downs from an uncle). The books are scattered to the four winds now, but some of them certainly were a good deal more racist than “Everyone in the World Is White”:
Book 12, Footprints Under the Window, featured some Chinese characters who spoke in a ridiculous dialect and were just full of cringeworthy stereotypical behavior.
Book 13, The Mark on the Door, I don’t remember very well, but it involved Mexicans who if memory serves were described as your basic banditos–again, embarrassing to a modern audience, or at least to me back in the seventies.
Book 14, The Hidden Harbor Mystery, is the one I remember best–there was a “colored man” featured in the story, a blowhard and a cowardly bully who (again) spoke in horrible dialect and was the embodiment of every stereotype of lazy, shiftless Black people going at the time it was written (early thirties perhaps?).
I’m sure there were other HB books with no characters other than white people, where the racism would not have been front and center. These three, on the other hand…
I don’t know about Nancy Drew books, but would be surprised if they were significantly different.
As for the police–the first books definitely played them for laughs, with Chief Collig and Officer Smuff being incompetent buffoons, but that was stopped before the rewrites of the first 24 (?) books took place. My source is another book I had that has since disappeared, Ghost of the Hardy Boys, by Leslie MacFarlane (he wrote the first 18 or 20 books I believe); MacFarlane says that the publisher leaned on him somewhere along the line to make the cops less clownish. I’m not sure exactly when that would have happened–probably during the thirties, since I think the series got its start in 1927–but that transformation took place before the rewrites.
Ah, memory lane…
But that’s just it. We’re not talking about studying literature or history. We’re talking about reading books. And while you can read to study, most people are reading for pleasure.
The original versions of books and the modern updated versions serve completely different purposes. That’s why I don’t see the existence of the latter as a threat to the former. Not as long as the versions are clearly marked, and the original is still available.
That said, I’m not satisfied with saying that we can just rely on used versions. Those can be harder to get your hands on and deteriorate over time. When I say “still available,” I really mean that there should be a historic edition. Perhaps it can even be an annotated version.
To me, the biggest threat of these types of updates is copyright. The copyright owner has an incentive not to make the original available in many cases, particularly when the original contains problematic elements. Copyright is why it can become possible that the original is lost or history rewritten.
Fortunately, there are tons of people out there who are interested in preservation, maintaining the copies until copyright expires, and listing differences in the meantime in a way that doesn’t violate copyright.
That can get complicated. I read old mysteries for pleasure; but part of the pleasure is that over the years they’ve gradually become historical novels – written from the inside. Even the best research can’t give the same feel as an author from the time.
But – blatant racism will, now that I’m no longer a clueless child, yank me right out of the book. A version that takes the edges off it, without changing the book drastically, is often possible; and, as I’m not doing serious research, I much prefer it. And as has been said upthread: when the author wasn’t intending to make a character seem evil, it warps their intention to have the character saying evil things.
It doesn’t bother me in the least to read Christie’s Ten Little without the original title. That title, and the assorted changes thereof, should be in any serious bio of her; but it doesn’t need to be on all the books. Or inside them all, either.
[discourse, why did you do that? that was a couple of square brackets, not a box. Oh well, I suppose it doesn’t matter.]
And who are you going to compel to keep these historic editions in print?
Nowadays, “in print” might just mean “accessible in electronic format.”
Hosting isn’t free, either.
No, but text files are relatively small and not difficult to store.
It wouldn’t even have to be a separate file. The original version could be included along with the modernized/sanitized version, as an appendix or something.
My concern isn’t whether anyone will be willing to keep old versions around, mine is that our copyrights last so long that no one has the right to do that except the copyright owner.
Mickey mouse is coming up for public domain again. I guess i should get off my ass and write my congress critters about copyright law.
Speaking of editing works… This year we edited the Passover haggadah in real time, as we read it. Mostly we changed pronouns and gendered descriptions of groups of people.
Sure, but someone still has to do it. And according to BigT’s model, will have to.
And someone has to write the annotations he’d like, as well. That’s also not free labour.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who’d do things like that anyway for a lot of texts - the InternetArchive, volunteers, etc all exist. But BigT’s model says that this should be done for all altered texts. That indicates at least some texts will need someone to be compelled to do it.
Isn’t that what graduate students are for? 
Well, most of the Nancy Drew and original Tom Swift books were written by a single author for a long stretch. The author of Tom Swift was Howard Garis who is more famous for writing the Uncle Wiggly books under his own name. But they were purely commercial, so it is hard to get upset with the publisher changing them to keep them commercial.
Real names on series books are no guarantee of authorship. Ann Martin didn’t write most of the later Baby Sitter Club books, for instance.
There’s also the case where an otherwise classic might drop from sight because of the outdated language. Conrad’s ''Narcissus" book is one such [link goes to original title].
It’s considered one of his major works, but the publishers have completely excised the word from recent printings, because they consider that the original wording would mean it would no longer be commercially viable. (And note that even when it was published, there was concern about the use of the term; it was re-titled “Children of the Sea” in its first American publishing.)
Conrad is a major author, and this novella was considered his break-out work - not because of the use of the word, but because of the themes that he explores. Do we lose a major work because of the use of the word, when Conrad appears to have been using it as the common vocabulary of the time?
Is it essential to the work, or can it be deleted?
This. I keep reading books taking place in the early 20th century where someone is described as “Black” with the capital. Takes me right out. Might as well have them talk about checking their Instagram (well, almost).
Which ones? The five must recent ones would be helpful.
Yeah, I heard they were going to update the Mona Lisa with new paint. . . stop it! Keep the history of these classic novels alive!
Negro is another word that is used. Also, Negress, if female. The word itself is the word for black in Spanish, but it also was from where the N-word derived.
I have read some mid century Brit Lit in which the N word was given as a dog’s name or when describing the color brown. I winced when I read it.
We have evolved, somewhat, but sometimes I think we spend too much time on piddling things to avoid looking at bigger issues. Of course, small things do count but they shouldn’t count too much. And I am very much in favor of not using demeaning language for any group of people. I hope we can overcome our tribal tendencies and just become Citizens of the Earth (starry eyed optimism!!)
Sometimes it’s not just a single word, but an incident several paragraphs long. I remember one of the Little House books in which the townsfolk had a talent contest and four guys did a blackface minstrel routines. One of them was Pa Wilder.
Someone wiser than me wrote that “Every minute spent worrying about [this stuff] is another minute not spent solving the actual problem”. Amen.