You likely know him best as the author of such classics as Animal Farm and 1984. George Orwell, whose name is synonymous with those of some of his best known works, was both a novelist and political thinker, and one of the great talents of 20th-century British satire. In an odd move recently, the Orwellian aegis was invoked by the Amazon corporation as part of their response to the publishing group Hachette, with whom they’ve had contractual disputes over e-book pricing since the spring of 2014. Acccused by Hachette of imposing sanctions on the sales of the publisher’s books as a negotiating tactic, Amazon has attempted to portray itself as a benefactor to readers, providing financially-crunched consumers with low e-book prices by cutting the profits of an “elite” European publishing house. Some authors, both Hachette’s own and others, have supported the publisher as defending their livelihood by maintaining non-cut-rate pricing, with nearly a thousand signing an open letter to Amazon’s board of directors calling the ethics of the company’s actions into question. In a perhaps ill-conceived attempt to invoke literary authority while critiquing that of publishers, Amazon’s official response to this letter compares Hachette’s resistance to e-book prices to the reactionary conservatism of Victorian publishing houses faced with the rise of cheap paperbacks–and uses an Orwell quote to do so, writing:
The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme…When a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books — he was wrong about that.
Representatives of the Orwell Estate, literary critics, and others, however, have been quick to point out that the incompleteness of this quote robs it of its intended import. Orwell’s full comment reads as follows: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.” Far from suggesting that paperbacks should actually be suppressed, Orwell’s commentary is clearly meant to be read as ironic.
The words of the great enemy of propaganda seem to have been somewhat distorted in Amazon’s public-relations efforts–which might serve to instruct us all that, regardless of our opinion on this dispute, it’s always a good idea to exercise caution when quoting a master ironist–and moreover, that should one attempt such quotation regardless, it helps to hire a well-compensated writer with competence in literary interpretation.
To discover more about the history of the uses and abuses of Orwell’s writings, see John Rodden’s George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. For more info on proper citation and best practices for integrating sources into your writing, see the Citing Sources LibGuide.
