Barnes & Noble suspended its 'Diverse Editions' classics in under 24 hours

In February 2020, Barnes & Noble and Penguin Random House prepared 'Diverse Editions': twelve classic texts — including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz — reissued with covers depicting major characters with dark-skinned illustrations by artists of 'different ethnicities and backgrounds'. The words were unchanged; the organisers said they had used artificial intelligence to review more than 100 older books and determine whether a character's race or ethnicity is specifically stated. The launch was timed to February — Black History Month.

The backlash was immediate. Author Adriana Herrera called the books 'the classics in blackface'. Mikki Kendall tweeted that they 'could have Googled, chosen a dozen books by actual Black authors that are classics & sent those out with fresh covers & a big event... They didn't do the easy or logical thing.' The project also landed while publishing was already under scrutiny over American Dirt's depiction of Mexican life; David Bowles, a leading critic of that book, called Diverse Editions an 'Absolute TONE-DEAF decision-making'.

Within a day, Barnes & Noble folded. 'We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative,' the company said on February 5, 2020, cancelling that evening's launch event and conceding the new covers were 'not a substitute for black voices or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard.'

The entire Diverse Editions line suspended before going on sale; the Fifth Avenue launch event cancelled; a diversity gesture became an embarrassment.

The project changed the packaging of white-authored classics instead of promoting books by non-white authors — substitution, not representation.

Using AI to determine which characters' race was 'unstated' invited exactly the reading that the covers were arbitrary recolouring.

Launching into Black History Month set the highest possible bar for a diversity gesture and guaranteed scrutiny.

It arrived amid the American Dirt controversy, when the industry's diversity failures were already the story of the season.

Substituting surfaces for substance is the fastest way to wreck a diversity initiative — celebrate the voices, not recolour the covers of everyone else's.

Barnes & Noble suspended the initiative and cancelled the February 5, 2020 event at its Fifth Avenue store before any books were sold, saying its stores would instead continue highlighting books by writers of colour during Black History Month. The line never relaunched.