Comment by sceaux

As a teenager I found this exact same ad in a Star Trek novel from the library. My first naive impression with these black bars was exactly as you said, that the original text is "under" them and just stuff incidentally referring to soup was left visible. "Look how clever we are, changing a replicator scene to a noodle-soup scene with just a bit of tweaking".

But it wasn't, of course. Its just a way to make you read it because you think its somehow still part of the novel. After the ad, the whole page starts again with its real (and completely different) content.