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The Mass-Market Edition Of "To Kill A Mockingbird" Is Dead
Topic Started: Mar 12 2016, 02:35 AM (57 Views)
Webster
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New Republic: The Mass-Market Edition Of "To Kill A Mockingbird" Is Dead

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On Monday, February 29, a judge in Monroe County, Alabama sealed Harper Lee’s will from public view. The motion was filed by the Birmingham law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, which was acting on behalf of Tonja Carter, Lee’s lawyer and the executor of her estate.

The decision to seal the will became public last Friday, and it was immediately controversial. This has been true of every legal move involving Lee and Carter over the last few years, even before the furor following the announcement, in February of last year, that Carter had “discovered” a lost sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.

Harper Lee was legendarily press-averse—interview requests after the mid-1960s were typically met with responses ranging from “no” to “hell no”—and indeed, Judge Greg Norris, who sealed the will, based his judgment on the need for privacy: “It is not the public’s business what private legacy she left for the beneficiaries of her will.”

We may never know what Lee’s will stipulates, but the estate’s first action in the wake of Lee’s death is both bold and somewhat baffling: The New Republic has obtained an email from Hachette Book Group, sent on Friday, March 4 to booksellers across the country, revealing that Lee’s estate will no longer allow publication of the mass-market paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.

-Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/131400/mass-market-edition-kill-mockingbird-dead
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Webster
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....another perspective on the topic....



The Guardian: Harper Lee's Estate Blocks Cheap Copies Of "To Kill A Mockingbird"

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The estate of Harper Lee has moved to end publication of a cheap paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird in the US.

According to emails obtained by the New Republic, Hachette, the US publisher of the mass-market edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, informed booksellers across America on 4 March that Lee’s estate would no longer allow publication of the mass-market paperback of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Hachette edition retails for $8.99, compared to the $14.99 and $16.99 larger trade paperback editions sold by HarperCollins, and has sold over 55,000 copies since the start of the year, more than double the sales of the trade paperback editions, the New Republic reported.

“The disappearance of the iconic mass-market edition is very disappointing to us, especially as we understand this could force a difficult situation for schools and teachers with tight budgets who cannot afford the larger, higher priced paperback edition that will remain in the market,” said the email from Hachette, which also claimed that “more than two-thirds of the 30m copies sold worldwide since publication have been Hachette’s low-priced edition”.

Lee died at the age of 89 on 19 February, leaving behind her the 1961 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the Pulitzer prize-winning story of lawyer Atticus Finch’s courtroom battle to save a black man accused of rape by a white woman, and its sequel Go Set a Watchman. Published last year, the novel was actually written before Lee’s acclaimed debut, with her decision to release it after decades of silence greeted with controversy, although allegations of elder abuse against the writer were subsequently declared unfounded.

Last week, Lee’s will was sealed from public view by an Alabama judge, after lawyers for Lee’s attorney Tonja Carter – the “dear friend” who Lee had said in a statement “discovered” the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman – asked for the will to remain private.

According to the emails seen by the New Republic, the decision for Hachette’s mass-market edition of Lee’s debut to be discontinued was “per the author’s wishes”, although an attachment to the email said that “as of 4/25/16 there will no longer be a mass-market edition of To Kill a Mockingbird available from any publisher in the US as per the wishes of the author’s estate”.

A friend of Lee’s, Claudia Durst Johnson, author of Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird, told the New York Times that it made no sense for the estate to pull the edition to “make money at the expense of school children’s access to this classic”. “This book is a standard in our schools, which are struggling financially now,” she said.

A spokesperson for Lee’s publisher in the UK said that there would be no changes to publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in the UK.
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