Talk:The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book

Right to print the Bible

Er, how can you withdraw a publisher's right to print the Bible? It is (long) out of copyright, after all. --Bonalaw 14:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

The modern translations are covered by copyright. There are many modern translations and I'd imagine Collins held rights to one of them in 1986. They certainly do now: the NIV is the most popular modern translation (according to Wikipedia) and Collins currently hold exclusive North American publishing rights to the NIV (see http://www.tniv.info/quickfacts.php).

But I partly agree with your point - the article currently implies they they threatened to withdraw the rights to print all Bibles, and as far as I know that's not possible...it was more likely all material that some Christian media company held the rights to (like Zondervan, which has rights to the NIV Bible and many other Christian books). I will alter the page accordingly.

That part of the article was based on the interview with Douglas Adams which is in the External Links section. Also I remember reading about it in a newspaper at the time. The relevant section of the interview goes like this:

A couple of years ago I edited a book in England which was just a lot of the best known comedy writers and so on in England doing stuff….this was all to raise money for Ethiopia and Sudan. I think 500,000 of them were printed... and a huge proportion of that money was going to be going straight through to famine relief, and unfortunately there were a couple of things in the book that the churches objected to. There was one bit which was the gospel according to a sheep. I thought this an extremely sympathetic piece actually, I thought it was very funny. It was written by a friend of mine called Richard Curtis with a few little additions by me, and it basically tells the story of the nativity night from the point of view of one of the sheep, that actually gets eaten in the general festivities at the end, and therefore has a slightly jaundiced view of the whole episode - he feels that it is obviously great for a lot of people but not so great for himself. And so the churches got very very upset about that and tried to get us done for criminal blasphemy, and picketed bookshops and so on… this was raising money for famine relief, I mean what can you say to that, it just sort of beggars the mind. And in the end, because the publishers also have the right, which is a very hard won and much protected right, to publish the Bible and all that kind of stuff, it meant they had to be very sensitive to this or they were going to loose that, and so they stopped printing the book, and as a result considerably less money than we could have raised was raised for famine relief.

--Tower 03:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Check me if I am wrong - this is the, "Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Book," that has had several printings, all by HarperCollins, at least one of which is a paperback edition with a big gold, "Over 16 Million Books Sold," plastered right on the front cover? I guess (Christian) religious censorship isn't all it's cracked up to be? 71.120.2.107 (talk)mjd —Preceding undated comment added 17:29, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

The printing in the gold star actually says, "Over 16 Million Books Sold by the authors of", followed by, "The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book" (which has 42 authors). So I guess Christian censorship is alive and effective. I own the first edition published in Great Britain in 1986 by Fontana Paperbacks. 74.205.219.202 (talk) 03:51, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

This page not locatable by Search

Why is this page not covered by Wikipedia's search facility? E.g. entering 'The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas' and pressing Search will show a list of pages that link to this one, but not this one! --Tower 04:07, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

It's working fine now. --Tower 20:31, 4 February 2006 (UTC)