I was browsing the web, and stopped by the Meisha Merlin website, and noted the following announcement:

Meisha Merlin in collaboration with the Robert A. Heinlein trust are proud to announce the printing of the Virginia Edition, the definitive collection of Robert A Heinlein. This historical project will span 40+ titles over four years. Included in this Limited Edition series will be many never before seen passages that had been edited out in subsequent printings. Our desire is to produce a collection true to the spirit and vision of one of our genres greatest authors.

There are all sorts of things that disappointed me about this, but the main ones are that I’d hope such a project might have come from one of the mass market publishers, and that they might have learned from previous unexpurgated Heinlein texts, and stuck with the original published versions. In fairness, I will say that it’s much less disappointing than what has happened with the Fritz Leiber and Clifford Simak reprint series, but it does make it seem like some strange, weird irony that these classic authors are being published in this manner. It makes you appreciate how lucky Edgar Pangborn has been.