11) Credit On Return – The Book Exchanges 1954-95
Who was the last person in England to actually go to prison for selling literary (ie non-illustrated) mucky books? It was almost certainly David Britton (1945-2020) a Mancunian sci-fi buff / author / publisher / businessman who served 19 days in Strangeways in May 1982 after one of his shops – Orbit Books on Whittle Street – was raided by local police. His dramatic story – very much a case of definitively being in the wrong place at the wrong time – handily introduces us to the last of our forgotten Great British Dirty Book Institutions: the fondly-remembered Book Exchanges.
The original Book Exchange seems to have been set up in Brighton c.1954 by Danny Grout and Stan Fletcher. Their ‘Popular Book Centre’ was such a success the pair quickly followed it with another in Shepherds Bush (in the Market underneath the railway bridge), then one in Clapham Junction (near the summit of Lavender Hill), then Tooting (on the corner of Selkirk Road), and then back out into the provinces. By the ’60s practically every town and city in the country boasted at least one example, all based on Danny and Stan’s genius original business model.
The PBCs represented a genuine innovation in retailing. As another writer puts it: “Recognising that many people didn’t want to buy their books and magazines outright but simply wanted to read them, they instituted a policy of ‘half-price credit on return’ against a future purchase. This was in effect a variant on the old subscription library system, but whereas the libraries mostly handled hardcovers, the PBC specialised in paperbacks and magazines. The clever bit of the scheme lay in the word ‘credit’, which meant that the firm never, ever, bought the titles back. The books and magazines themselves were adorned (or defaced, according to your point of view) with two stamps – a big one which bore the name, address and other shop details, and a small one in which was written the price (usually only a tiny bit less than the full retail price, despite the often battered condition of the book). If the punter brought the book back (and there were no time limits, unlike libraries, and you were welcome to keep the book if you wanted), they’d be allowed half-price towards the next book they took. If they brought in suitable books not purchased from the PBC they’d be allowed credit on those, but a much smaller percentage. Thus – in theory at least – the firm never had to put its hand in its pocket for stock again”.
Rochester Row, Victoria SW19
Numerous independent entrepreneurs latched onto this basic model. The local outfit in Birmingham was Reader’s World, which started out in the early 70s with a popular stall in the Bull Ring’s Rag Market. In 1979 RW moved into a tiny shop in Smallbrook Queensway underpass (recently vacated by Nostalgia & Comics) but this closed in 1990 when the subway was demolished. They then shifted around the corner to a much bigger double-unit at 16 Hurst Street, then in 1995 moved again a few hundred yards east to 137 Digbeth, where they remained until final closure in Dec 2014. A measure of their quite legendary local reputation is a very pithy online review which simply states “The most rude psychotic staff ever”. This is pushing it a bit, but they certainly had their moments.
The key point about the Book Exchanges (which relatively few sci-fi buffs / bibliophiles are particularly keen to acknowledge) is that a significant proportion of their turnover was based on secondhand porn. Which brings us back to David Britton, arguably England’s very last Dirty Book Martyr.
Britton edited small-press sci-fi magazines between 1969-75 (including Weird Fantasy, Bognor Regis and Crucified Toad), and in 1970 met writer Charles Partington, who had earlier helped form the Northern Science Fiction and Fantasy Group, and subsequently went on to publish his own fanzine, Something Else. Together, Britton and Partington opened an SF bookshop, House on the Borderland, on Manchester’s Port Street in 1972, which offered an eclectic range of counter-culture books, comics, records and posters while playing its ‘background’ music at provocatively ear-splitting volume. It also happened to be situated directly below a brothel, and Britton soon decided that stocking some discreet soft-porn would dramatically increase his appeal to passing trade.
Michael Butterworth (b.1947) had a similar Mancunian literary background, writing short-stories for Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in the late 60s. He met Britton in 1974 (via an introduction from a shared local printer) and the two went into partnership, creating a joint-imprint Savoy Books in 1976, initially to republish neglected avant-garde fiction by the likes of Henry Treece and Jack Trevor Story. HOTB meanwhile closed after two years, but did well enough to inspire a string of follow-up city-centre shops run by Britton: Orbit Books (1974) on Whittle Street, Bookchain (1976) on Peter Street, and Starplace (1979) on Oldham Street. By the early 80s Savoy was expanding out of Manchester, opening another Bookchain in Leeds, and Chapter One in Liverpool (amongst others). These were all still dominated by SF and comics, but a significant percentage of their turnover now lay in curtained-off soft porn.
This created a problem. The appearance of Savoy in 1976 had happened to coincide with the appointment of James Anderton as Chief Constable of Manchester. Anderton, or ‘God’s Cop’ as he disparagingly came to be known, was a biblical puritan on a ruthless one-man mission to clean up his city and immediately targeted the Savoy operation with an enthusiasm that soon became all-too personal. Between his appointment in 1976 and (enforced) departure in 1991 Anderton ordered more than fifty individual raids on Britton’s shops (not that he was focused solely on Savoy – in one internal report he claimed to have obtained a total of 1,010 magistrates’ search warrants 1976-1981, meaning that, on average, at least one Manchester shop or distributor was being raided every two days). Britton’s shops were also being simultaneously hit during this period by the BPI for dealing in bootleg LPs – another growth industry of the 70s – with Orbit being successfully raided in 1976 and 1979 on this basis and heavily fined as a result.
David Britton c.1985
Worse was to come. Orbit was raided again in Nov 1980, and Britton and shop-manager Philip Bunton arraigned on charges of possessing obscene publications for gain. Savoy were now reprinting cult US ‘erotic’ sci-fi (Charles Platt’s The Gas and Samuel Delany’s The Tides of Lust were both seized) but the eventual charges related to seven mixed paperbacks from Maurice Girodias’s New Venus Press: No Place for a Lady by A de Granamour / Something for the Boys by Kenneth Harding / Mama Liz Drinks Deep & Mama Liz Tastes Flesh & Secret Sisterhood (all by Howard Rheingold) / Cruel Lips by Marcus Van Heller / Two Suspicious Girls by Katy Mitchell. These had all been published in 1973 (though Cruel Lips was in fact an ancient 1956 Olympia Press reprint), with Savoy picking them up at remainder prices in 1978 (meaning they’d already gone through HM Customs). Even more frustratingly, all had been seized in earlier raids and returned without comment, but this time there would be no such leniency. Bunton got a one-month suspended sentence, while Britton was handed 28 days in Strangeways (of which as noted he served 19 in May 1982). On the morning of his release yet another of the Savoy shops was hit with further material seized, though by this point Anderton was happily raiding WHSmiths for copies of Playboy and Manchester had effectively become a city under siege.
Savoy had been enjoying a lucrative short-lived distribution deal with New English Library, and the loss of this (on NEL’s collapse in 1981), combined with the debilitating effects of the continuous raids meant that the original Savoy Books was forced into liquidation. Most of the first-generation shops closed around this point, with only Peter Street’s Bookchain surviving. A few new stores gradually replaced them, but these became increasingly seedy, as more and more of their basic turnover relied on under-the-counter porn.
Savoy reformed with a new imprint, and in May 1989 published Britton’s novel Lord Horror, a lurid fantasy revolving around a re-imagining of British wartime traitor William Joyce (or ‘Lord Haw Haw’ as he became known), here presented as a rabidly murderous Sadean lunatic searching for the surviving Adolf Hitler after the War. Also included in the action is a strangely familiar-sounding policeman named James Appleton, who provides some of the book’s most determinedly offensive passages. The novel pushes every available button in terms of its sex, sadistic violence, and (most controversially) virulent anti-semitism, and to no one’s great surprise copies were seized four months later in Sept. After lengthy delays, magistrate Derrick Fairclough declared it obscene in Aug 1991, but the verdict was overturned on Appeal a year later in July 1992, not on the basis of any claimed merit, but simply because (as QC Geoffrey Robertson pointed out) the original prosecution had been in clear contravention of current guidelines.
Six of the seven US paperbacks that briefly sent Britton to Strangeways in May 1982
By this point the gloves were off on both sides, and Savoy began stocking its remaining bookshops quite openly with hardcore. Bookchain was thus raided yet again in Aug 1991, and as a result Britton this time served a full four months in Strangeways over April – July 1993. Bookchain finally closed in 1998 and was demolished the following year as part of the city centre’s ongoing redevelopment. Decent Mancunians could finally walk the streets again.
As a footnote, the (briefly) successful Lord Horror prosecution prompted the last little flurry of legal activity the UK has seen to date. Within days of the Aug 1991 Manchester verdict, Mary Whitehouse formally complained to DPP Sir Allan Green about two even newer books: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (published by Picador in April), and the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (written as we’ve seen in 1798, and published for the first time in the UK by Arrow in July).
Whitehouse was not alone in her concern that a line had been crossed. A few fashionable critics were prepared to (cautiously) defend Easton Ellis’s jet-black satire, but after the Chester Assizes of April 1966 nobody was ever going to try defending de Sade. In Nov, Tory MP Ann Winterton tabled an Early Day Motion “That this House deplores the publication by Arrow Books Ltd of the novel Juliette by the Marquis de Sade… and hopes that the Crown Prosecution Service will take a decision to delay no longer the bringing of prosecutions against the publishers” which drew cross-party support from 29 MPs including Labour’s Diane Abbott. But by then events were moving very fast: Allan Green had been forced to resign just a fortnight earlier (after being caught kerb-crawling in Kings Cross), and his replacement Dame Barbara Mills – the first woman to hold the post – announced in Dec that No Action would be taken against either title.
There was still plenty of rumbling, and in July 1992 newly-elected Lib Dem Liz Lynne (clearly keen to demonstrate her staunchly liberal principles) followed Winterton’s lead and brought an Adjournment Debate demanding that Juliette be banned. Responding on behalf of the government, Michael Jack had to politely point out the obvious: that no action had been (or would be) taken for the simple reason there was no realistic prospect of obtaining a conviction. Following the 1976 Lovelace verdict, literature (no matter how provocative) was effectively protected, and – with nowhere to go – the controversy eventually fizzled out. If the British public could tolerate the Divine Marquis after two full centuries of appalled suppression, they could presumably tolerate anything.
Returning to the Book Exchanges, what sort of material did they actually sell? There are plenty of fond chat-forum reminiscences, but one particularly vivid snapshot appears in Patrick Kearney’s 2005 memoir detailing his brief career as a youthful book-smuggler shuttling between Paris and London in the mid-60s:
“For a while I made some extra money smuggling Olympia Press books into England and selling them to Alan Bale, an sf fan who ran Premier Book Centres in Chiswick. Alan’s shop was modelled on the Popular Book Centres, a chain that specialised in giving you half your money back in credit for the second-hand books and magazines you bought there and returned. There always seemed to be something a bit sleazy about these places. One, near the British Museum, had a rack of books outside that invariably featured the Paul Elek paperback reprints of Emile Zola’s novels. Already rendered garishly vulgar by having irrelevant cover illustrations of nudes by old masters, they would be further debased with wide paper bands wrapped around them on which would be hand-written in Magic Marker™ inducements like “Adults Only,” “Hot Stuff!!”, “Extra Spicy.” One can only wonder at the cruel disappointment met by those who picked up a copy of Germinal.
Alan’s shop – he had only one, despite being called Premier Book Centres – was similar, but seemed more respectable… But it wasn’t only science fiction that Alan sold. Out of sight under the counter were tucked a couple of battered suitcases containing what the punters called “readers” – dirty books. Mostly these were ‘Soho Bibles’ [ie Typescripts] short, mimeographed novels reproduced from typewriting and illustrated with blurry black and white photos having no connection whatsoever with the story. I gather these were quite a profitable line for Alan – he’d rent them out at, I think, a couple of quid or more a time. Despite my fascination with the subject, these things never greatly interested me and I suppose some sort of agreement was arrived at whereby I’d smuggle real books in from Paris for him. I can no longer recall the circumstances of exactly how this came about, but it didn’t last long once the available pornography published by Girodias under the Ophelia Press imprint had been exhausted. Many of the books with the famous green wrappers of the Traveller’s Companion series were a bit too literary for “the lads in Chiswick” and I believe it was something by Jean Genet – or was it Jean Cocteau? – which eventually put the tin hat on the venture. I could have continued on by importing novels by Girodias’ competitors, but I found little to recommend them and was unwilling to risk my neck smuggling them through customs….”
54 High Street, Bilston – previously a junk shop / Book Exchange in the 1980s.
Most Exchanges featured a couple of shelves labelled ‘Erotic’ or ‘Adults Only’ though their actual content could vary dramatically, from multiple battered copies of Chris Wood’s ubiquitous Confessions series through to occasional US hardcore from Greenleaf / Brandon House etc – the latter were always priced significantly higher at £3 – £4 each. Readers World in Hurst Street had a tall bookcase strategically placed next to the Counter which always repaid careful examination. The Rag Market stall (which ran concurrently with the various shops) was even sleazier, with a couple of cardboard boxes of what the cognoscenti used to refer to as jazz mags – old copies of Club and Mayfair etc. These were constantly being browsed by a stream of self-consciously shifty teenagers, though the bored elderly proprietress perched on an adjacent stool had clearly seen it all before.
Some places were even more random, and were essentially just junk shops with a bookcase or two of scruffy paperbacks (offered on the old Credit system) half-buried amongst piles of battered secondhand furniture and chipped ornaments. One such Black Country emporium – on Bilston High Street a few doors down from the Trumpet pub – always had a small selection of the otherwise-scarce photocopied US hardcore pbks stocked in the early Private Shops (no doubt their original source here). In those days Bilston was best-known for its illegal dog-fighting, and The Trumpet was one of those pubs where the bar would immediately fall silent as soon as you walked in. As with the Rag Market, the proprietress was an older woman (possibly the widow of the original owner?) who was simultaneously friendly and hard as nails. After your author had made several rewarding forays (but deliberately failed to return any of his accumulating purchases) she suddenly exploded “Look Luv, yer supposed to BRING ‘EM BACK! I won’t have any LEFT at this rate!” and further visits seemed ill-advised. The shop later became the marginally more swish (for Bilston) ‘Vintique’, then later still a Balti House, but is now (inevitably) a Mini Market. The Trumpet is still there (if you’re feeling both thirsty and brave).
The Exchanges (like so much else in traditional British popular culture) were quickly killed off by the internet. eBay launched in the US in Sept 1995 (UK: July 1999), while Amazon began bookselling in July 1995 (UK: Oct 1998). The dedicated secondhand retailer Abebooks launched in May 1996 (UK: Aug 2002) and was acquired by Amazon in 2008. There is little to add to this bland sequence of dates, beyond observing that the survival of Readers World right up to the end of 2014 is pretty impressive under the circumstances.
The internet of course also changed the whole concept of ‘publication’ so radically that pursuing this story beyond De Sade’s belated clearance in Dec 1992 is effectively meaningless anyway. In the decade following the 1976 Lovelace acquittal, literary standards liberalised so fast that what was once furtively sold under-the-counter in Soho soon became freely available on the nation’s public library shelves. One mini-watershed in this regard was the launch in Feb 1985 of Mills & Boon’s groundbreaking Temptation Romance series, which ran for fifteen popular years. The Temptations featured confident / independent young Career women enthusiastically engaging in (whisper it) guilt-free pre-marital sex, though these torrid (and cautiously euphemised) bouts always ended in traditional marriage to the rugged hero. But no matter how cheesy, they unmistakably reflected a shift in society’s attitudes to sex and how the latter could be written about. Even a dozen years earlier their level of physical detail would have been potentially liable to prosecution (at least in Manchester).
1987: A New Romance For Today’s Woman….
Another more recent example would be Erika “EL James” Mitchell’s Fifty Shades trilogy, which began as Twilight-inspired online fan-fiction in Aug 2009, and soon created such a buzz it was picked up and commercially paperbacked by Vintage in April 2012. The quality (or otherwise) of the writing involved seems barely relevant when by Aug 2013 the series had earned its author a reported $95m (though India, Land of Lust suddenly begins to look like potential Booker material). Again, their (largely uncontroversial) sexual detail underlines just how far into the literary mainstream erotica has now, er, penetrated.
And with that last observation we finally arrive at the sole outstanding question seeming to require an answer. Now that sex is – broadly – no longer considered a forbidden topic and curiosity about it is deemed healthy rather than simply disgusting, what really remains of our long history of repressed guilt and shame concerning it? As three paternalist centuries of ruthless legal suppression recede steadily into the past, has the darkly subversive power of Dirty Books finally been exorcised? Like Nosferatu fatally exposed to the sunrise, is their malign power dissipated now the sinister blacked-out windows are gone? What might still be lurking in the shadowy suitcases under the Counter? We can close this rambling investigation by obliquely addressing the true legacy of Dirty Books via one last piece of (thoroughly disreputable) local history…..
Epilogue – Dirty Bookshop Ghosts
Let’s talk a bit about landscape. Bear with me, there is a point to all this.
The heart of Walsall’s town centre (hosting the iconic statue of her Victorian heroine, Dorothy ‘Sister Dora’ Pattison) is The Bridge, where four major roads meet in an ‘X’ – Lichfield Street, Park Street, Bradford Street and Digbeth. The latter is the oldest route, climbing steadily south-east towards the steep slope of Church Hill, from where the lofty spire of St Matthews looks down over the town. Digbeth is still home to Walsall’s ancient Market (or what’s left of it), though has been very heavily redeveloped since the Millennium.
Running south-west off the top of Digbeth (ie following the foot of the slope) is George Street, which boasted two landmark buildings at either end – to the south (on the junction with Upper Hall Lane) was Shannon’s Mill, and to the north (on the junction with Digbeth itself) was the Brewery Stores pub. In between these was a short run of quirky Victorian shops, chiefly secondhand junk / antique emporiums that never seemed to change.
Shannons Mill, George Street, Walsall. Left: August 1977. Right: August 2007
Shannon’s Mill was built in 1887 by Scots tailor John Shannon. It was a massive four-storey factory extending along half the street’s west side (facing up towards St Matthews) and by 1905 employed 2,000 staff (chiefly teenage girls operating its many hundreds of sewing machines). Two generations of the present writer’s family worked there – my great-grandfather (as a tailor) between c1895-1950, and then his daughter (my maternal grandmother) as a typist c1958-73. In 1973 the firm was drastically downsized, with tailoring (now no longer viable on such a vast scale) replaced by specialist leatherwork. Part of the west frontage was converted into individual shop-units (for various mixed businesses including leather goods, a saddlery, a jewellers and a Gents outfitters), with most of the huge factory behind mothballed. In 2000 Shannons finally ceased trading and the entire building was emptied. There were vague plans to convert it into a luxury hotel, but on the night of Friday 3rd August 2007 a massive fire tore through it and burned it to the ground. The remains were declared unsafe and demolished, with the whole site cleared by the end of the month. At the time of writing the overgrown plot is still vacant, with weeds sprouting from the rubble and its ramshackle hoardings covered in graffiti.
Peoples March for Jobs, May 1981. Shannons on the left, Brewery Stores on extreme right.
The Brewery Stores pub was even older, opened in 1777. It fronted Digbeth (its actual address was 40 High Street), but stretched a long way back down George Street. It changed names regularly, becoming The Castle in 1818, Paine’s Wine Vaults in 1868, The Punch & Judy in 1985, The Brewery Stores (again) in 1998, Henri’s Bar in 2005, and (very briefly) The Market Tavern in 2008 before finally closing for good in 2009. It’s currently boarded up and derelict (but is at least still standing).
The Brewery Stores pub near the end of its life in 2005. Note cellar-entrance door on right, behind empty market-stall frame. Shannons on far-left (behind car). The bright green shop-front opposite the car is the infamous junk shop at no. 67.
The pub originally featured a formal Ballroom / Assembly Room – the latter was in use from at least 1800 by the Sheriff of Staffordshire, who held a court there every third Monday for the recovery of debts under 40 shillings. There was also a large barrel-vaulted cellar – the so-called Vaults – accessed via its own doorway on the right of the Digbeth frontage. This was long, low and narrow, running under the whole length of the pub beneath George St. During the 1980s (the Punch & Judy era) it was used to put bands and discos on at weekends, but was never a hugely popular venue. It was claustrophobic and stuffy, and the acoustics were terrible – the walls ran with condensation, and in the winter it was always uncomfortably cold.
The rear part of the pub was later (probably in the 1890s) converted into a small shop, 67 George Street. From c.1960 until at least 1995 this was an incredibly grimy secondhand junk shop (prop: BJ Luke) with a notorious local reputation. Yeah, you knew we were going to get here eventually didn’t you?
My mum and gran often used to disparagingly talk about this place, as it was regularly raided by the police for selling porn. This was possibly reported in the local press, or may simply have been the scandalised gossip of Shannon’s canteen. Along with some of the grubbiest, most horrible-looking old furniture you can possibly imagine stacked up in the window, there were three tall bookcases along the right-hand wall stuffed with dog-eared 1950s paperbacks, and a battered desk at the back which the proprietor used to sit behind. Above this desk, wall-mounted at shoulder-height, were two wire racks containing an array of incredibly dodgy-looking magazines. The only title I can clearly recall was something called Juicy Lucy, which I don’t think contained Smoothie recipes. Prior to the arrival of Walsall’s first Private Shop in 1982, I imagine 67 George Street must have been the town’s premier go-to source for such material, hosting a furtive stream of shifty customers in long raincoats (quite possibly tailored by my great-grandfather).
As noted, the shop was originally part of the pub itself, with the latter’s long cellar running directly beneath it. In their entertaining book ‘Beer and Spirits – a Guide to Haunted Pubs in the Black Country’ (2010) authors Andrew Homer and David Taylor have this to say about it:
“The Brewery Stores is an imposing Victorian building with many of its original features still intact. It is in an area of Walsall which has a colourful history… indeed, the market running along the High Street outside dates back to medieval times and it is thought the Brewery Stores was built on a burgage plot [ie land originally leased to a market-trader]… When the pub was being renovated some years ago, an old rotten set of stocks was found in the cellar, and later research revealed that an area further down the High Street (on the opposite side of the market) was once used for the punishment of minor crimes by locking offenders in them [possibly bad debtors sentenced by the Sheriff as per above]…
Between January and March 1998 the Highgate Brewery employed various contractors to completely renovate the pub. Right from when the workmen first moved in, there were complaints of things going missing and tools being moved. At first it was just assumed a fellow workman was playing practical jokes, but all this was to change after the events of Friday 13th February 1998. One of the workmen, Rob, was on his own down in what was to become the Cellar Bar, tidying up his tools at the end of the day. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed something at the end of the bar nearest the main street. He looked up to see what it was, and was confronted by the disembodied head of an elderly bearded man. He had a hood pulled over his head, but no other part of his body could be seen. The workman looked away for a split second to see if anyone else had come down into the cellar, but he was alone apart from the spectral figure. By now thoroughly terrified by the experience, he quickly left the building and steadfastly refused to go back into the cellar unless accompanied by other workmen with all the lights on. It emerged that his colleagues had also experienced the oppressive, cold atmosphere of the cellar and no one liked working down there alone.
A DJ working for Vault Radio and broadcasting from the Cellar Bar suddenly felt very cold one evening and went to put on his overcoat. When he came back he reached to pick up his headphones but they mysteriously moved away from him as though pushed by an unseen hand. While locking up late one night a member of staff went down into the cellar to turn lights off. While down there the sound of a very heavy bench being dragged across a wooden floor was heard, although nothing could be seen and nothing had moved. More recently, a member of staff who works in the Cellar Bar has seen a shadowy figure pass along the far end of the room on at least two occasions. The cellar certainly isn’t the only active area in the pub, as an apparition described by a past resident as an ‘old lady’ is said to walk around the first floor and the kitchen. One of the chefs, while chopping vegetables, saw the reflection of a ‘misty figure’ pass straight through the wall…”
Yeah, sure. Talk about an overactive imagination eh? I mean, you read all this stuff about ghosts being psychic imprints of obsessive negative emotions – guilt, shame, fear, regret, self-disgust or whatever – but I don’t believe it myself. People just get carried away don’t they? Even though it’s been shut and empty for a dozen years, I could spend a night in that cellar no bother – Christ, I drank enough flat beer down there when I was a kid. Look, let me prove it to you. I’ll go down there now, ok? Brr, it’s a bit cold in here. And dark. And there’s a few funny noises. Probably rats or something. What was that movement in the corner? Just a trick of the light. There it is again. How can that… how can that shadow be moving by itself? A patch of mist… solidifying… into… into something… a figure… Jesus, this can’t be happening. I can see features now. A bulbous nose, petulant thick-lipped pout, long wavy hair, white neckerchief, some sort of dark frock-coat…. Holding a book in its left hand, though the right is perhaps fortunately obscured… Wait a minute, I know that face! It’s…. it’s……
Why, Mr Pepys! Whatever are YOU doing here?
67 George Street, Walsall, March 2018.
Select Bibliography
A wide variety of books were consulted while writing this essay, and it would be pedantic and boring to list them all, even if the author could be bothered (which he can’t). Equally, he can’t pretend to have come up with it entirely on his own either. The best available compromise would seem to be to note the key source-text for each of the eleven sections, as follows:
*DB1 Kearney, Patrick ‘Erotic Literature’ (Macmillan) 1982
*DB2 Robertson, Geoffrey ‘Obscenity: the Law in Context’ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 1979
*DB3 Craig, Alec ‘The Banned Books of England’ (Allen & Unwin) 1962
*DB4 Travis, Alan ‘Bound and Gagged’ (Profile) 2000
*DB5 Rolph, CH ‘Books in the Dock’ (Andre Deutsch) 1969
*DB6 Sutherland, John ‘Offensive Literature’ (Junction Books) 1982
*DB7 Gertz, Stephen ‘West Coast Blue’ – in Daley, Astrid ‘Sin-a-Rama’ (Feral House) 2016
*DB8 Tomkinson, Martin ‘The Pornbrokers’ (Virgin) 1982
*DB9 Wickstead, Helen ‘Soho Typescripts’ (Kingston University) 2020 [academic essay currently available online]
*DB10 Killick, Mark ‘The Sultan of Sleaze’ (Penguin) 1994
*DB11 Locke, George ‘A Boy and His Bike’ (in Prolapse #11) 2008 [fanzine article currently available online]
This essay is dedicated to the author’s mother, who dearly wishes it had never been written.
(c) Sim Branaghan Sept – Dec 2021