You have to love the powers of hype. The Little Red Schoolbook, once the subject of a controversial and successful obscenity prosecution in the UK, has just been republished, allegedly in its original, uncensored version. Except it isn't.

A straight-talking education book by Soren Hansen and Jesper Jensen, it was always going to be a problematic volume in the early Seventies UK, where both obscenity and subversion were causes for establishment concern – the likes of Mary Whitehouse were as worried about Reds under the bed as they were about sex and violence, and a book like this, with it's title play on Mao's Little Red Book and straight talk about sex, was an obvious title for the authorities to go after – especially as it was aimed at kids. Soren's book covered a whole raft of societal issues, encouraging the young reader to question authority and the rules of society that they had been taught. It also covered sex and drugs in a straightforward, non-judgemental manner.

In 1971, over a thousand copies of the book were seized by the British police (17,000 having already been sold) and found guilty in an obscenity trial, a verdict upheld by the European Commission of Human Rights in 1975. The success of the trial is widely considered to have played a part in the decision to subsequently go after underground magazine Oz. An expurgated version of the book was subsequently published.

So while the book is now something of a historical oddity, it's good to see it finally republished. Or it would be if it wasn't still an edited version. While news reports are talking as if the book is entirely uncensored (“later this month the full, unexpurgated Little Red Schoolbook will be available in Britain for the first time” says The Guardian, while the cover blurb says it is the “original and uncensored edition”), the hacks writing about it seem to be simply regurgitating the words of a press release. As the reports go on to say, publisher Martin Wagner has decided to make a cut. In a section on how to keep yourself amused in boring lessons, the book originally suggested "reading pornographic magazines under your desk". This has now been deleted, for what would seem to be moral reasons. So the book isn't the uncensored original version it claims to be.

One line might not seem important. But aside from the moral judgement about porn that the deletion implies, any deliberate removal, no matter how small, renders claims of 'uncensored' false. A film cut by one second is still cut.

Buyer beware.

UPDATE: Martin Wagner informs us that the deleted section has been moved to the footnotes, with a explanation.