Experience book cover: The banned image

The image is being used to promote the paperback release of the book and publishers Vintage are still planning to use it in a national newspaper advertising campaign and in bookshops.

But they are changing the underground poster so that it will have a plain black background.

A spokeswoman for Vintage told BBC News Online that they were "surprised" when they heard of the decision.

"It is their call," she said. "But the image has been around for a year, and we have had no complaints."

More than a thousand posters using the image were put up in bookshops when the hardback version was published in May 2000.

'Illegal'

She said that Amis was seven or eight years old when the picture was taken.

A London Underground spokeswoman said that they had banned it because they must adhere to the law.

"As it is illegal for children under the age of 16 to smoke, this advertising was rejected," she told the Guardian newspaper.

"We also feel it could be said it incited children to break the law."

This ban comes after the tube authorities banned two other posters for clothes shop Miss Selfridge.

One showed five women giving the V-sign while the other showed scantily-clad female models, after the Underground decided customers would find it "difficult to avert their eyes".