This is the story of a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-not an Earth book, never published on Earth and, until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.
![the utterly utterly merry comic relief christmas book the utterly utterly merry comic relief christmas book](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/8qwAAOSwQ8Vepmm~/s-l300.jpg)
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read 74. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (SF Masterworks HB) I own the first edition published in Great Britain in 1986 by Fontana Paperbacks. So I guess Christian censorship is alive and effective.
#The utterly utterly merry comic relief christmas book cracked#
Tower 03:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC) Reply 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) Reply 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). 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. 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. 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. I thought this an extremely sympathetic piece actually, I thought it was very funny. There was one bit which was the gospel according to a sheep. 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. 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. Also I remember reading about it in a newspaper at the time.
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That part of the article was based on the interview with Douglas Adams which is in the External Links section.
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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 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).
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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 ). There are many modern translations and I'd imagine Collins held rights to one of them in 1986. Bonalaw 14:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC) Reply The modern translations are covered by copyright. Er, how can you withdraw a publisher's right to print the Bible? It is (long) out of copyright, after all.