Nominee for Worst Book Title

I have commented on several occasions on this blog and elsewhere that I am not deeply offended or upset by the somewhat racist language and attitudes sometimes found in the books of earlier times.

I simply accept that any book is going to include evidences of the prevailing attitudes of the times in which it was published. The author, as a product of his/her culture, would have been likely to share at least many of those attitudes, and would be likely to impute them to his/her characters. Therefore, casual conversation among the characters in a book published in the 1920s or 1930s might well include negative comments about Jews, or there might be black servants speaking in dialect. Such things can be mildly annoying in some cases, mildly amusing in others, but I don't too worked up over them.

And I'm not getting worked up over this book, either, but I've got to say it this is possibly the worst book title I have ever seen (or at least it's in the running with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers -- later retitled Ten Little Indians, now known as And Then There Were None).

In checking on Amazon, I note that this was re-issued later as 12 Chinamen and a Woman, which is an improvement.

I'm going to guess, based on the title and the cover blurb, that this is about 'white slavery', which was a popular delusion of the first half of the twentieth century.