My favorite bit: I am frightfully sorry about the printers’ prurience! Do please, when you are correcting proofs, replace f— by fucking in full; and David Blan

My favorite bit: I am frightfully sorry about the printers’ prurience! Do please, when you are correcting proofs, replace f— by fucking in full; and David Bland, our production manager, will get in touch with the printers personally to make sure that nothing goes wrong. Nothing better than an editor who literally gives a fuck! The letter reminded me of David Lodge's afterword to "Ginger, You're Barmy". When it was first published in 1962, he had to bowdlerize the swear words that were copious in a novel set in the army. A second edition was published later, when the word in question was deemed printable, and initially Lodge went through his manuscript restoring "fuck" after "fuck", until he finally thought better of the idea and left the manuscript in the initially published form.