Red actions

But Ms. Wilson and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, contend that much of the censored information is in the public domain — and that the suppression of information is itself part of Ms. Wilson’s story. So “Fair Game” has been published with the censor’s marks visible as blacked-out words, lines, paragraphs or pages. The publisher amplifies the book with an 80-page afterword by Laura Rozen, a reporter, who uses matters of public record to fill in some of the gaps. —NYT

Most of the work I’m doing on the book [An Ordinary Spy] right now isn’t exactly writing, though, it’s measuring. In addition to material in the novel that the PRB redacted (blacked out because it was classified), I redacted a lot of material myself for various reasons. That means the book is full of black redaction bars. By the time the manuscript went from my word processor to the typesetter’s computers to the printed page, the formatting on the bars had gotten messed up. Since each bar has to precisely cover the information it’s blacking out, I’ve spent the last several months bent over the book with a tape measure, comparing the length of the bars to the length of what was supposed to be under them. —Joseph Weisberg, in the NYT's Paper Cuts

Those black bars, those black bars... —Nicholson Baker, U & I