Der Autor über sein Buch
The lure of erotica in our parents' time: who? what? how?Why did I write this book? In downtown Philadelphia in June 1960, a "raiding party of five county detectives"--followed closely by TV reporters and their cameras--visited my uncle Ben's book shop. Bail for the clerk, his brother Isadore--my father--was set at $500. Isadore was seen on the local TV news that night trying to move the NBC microphone far enough from his face to wave the police off the premises; he said they were "hurting his business." "The books sold," said the Assistant District Attorney, "Would arouse any man, unless he were made of stone." But plenty of copies were available in any event, and could always be safely purchased at the local department stores. My uncle was just a businessman, but he sold material which could be seen as sexually explicit and therefore harmful. He was a "pariah capitalist," and had developed a certain range of talents and a healthy amount of chutzpah. In _Bookleggers and Smuthounds _I try to describe the reasons for prosecuting this sort of businessman, and how these "bookleggers" of the roaring twenties and hungry thirties distributed the wide range of materials they did. As I studied the interaction between the bookleggers and the smuthounds, I become convinced of a salient fact: publishers of erotica and the moralists who attacked them during the mid-twentieth century had (as they continue to have; see my Epilogue) a subtle symbiotic relationship. As good businesspeople, erotica distributors necessarily appealed to prurient fascination. Because they invited their clients to indulge curiosities which kept intact the association of sex with obscenity and shameful silence, the blunt fact of their existence provided the anti-vice crusaders with the public enemy they needed to show how fascination with sex was indeed a vice exploited by people with contempt for purity. One bookseller above all shouldered the burden of being a "dirty books man," and accumulated the emotional scars of being a pariah capitalist. This was Samuel Roth, the first to publish an unexpurgated edition of _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ in America. My final chapter is about the way this complex individual advertised his books, defined himself, and defied authority. I hope to show, by describing his career, the conflicted motives and psychic pressures of dealing in erotica in the interwar years, when books were still a chief means of communication, and when it was "sex o'clock in American literature."
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