Customer Reviews

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very readable, entertaining and well researched study of a period of American book publishing equivalent to the previous century's "Wild West". There are the "bad guys" (the censors) and the "good guys" (the authors and publishers and free speech attorneys) and all are presented as the idiocyncratic characters that they were. There is also an explanation of the whole social mileu that created the battlefield in which this struggle for the freedom to read took place. A great deal of previously unpublished bibliographic material about American erotica is presented, and the footnotes, set at the end of the book to be non-intrusive, contain additional wealths of information for the scholar and academic. The text is enhanced by many vintage illustrations and photographs, often gleaned from private collections.

The author tackles the question of why people who distributed books which were banned or critized as pornography were often Jewish. He has done his homework, digging up prominent examples, and makes comparisons between the other kinds of dirty jobs immigrants and their sons did, and the publishing and selling of smut. Sometimes, this "smut" was great literature; sometimes it was just plain curious and brought in good money during the depression. You get to know some of these men pretty well. You do not like them much, maybe, but you do understand. The author does a good job of explaining the career of the most famous of these publishers, a very complex and haunted man you diskike, but feel sorry for too.

This is a wonderfully conceived and splendidly executed history of the most important formative period of American erotica. Here, thanks to Gertzman's scholarship, the reader will find information available nowhere else: on marginal publishers and sexy books, and on the police and officials who tried to suppress them. The book chronicles investigations and campaigns by assorted smuthunters such as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Post Office, ambitious district attorneys, and the FBI. Gertzman breaks out the huge volume of erotica from underground presses into useful categories, and discusses each in detail, having drawn on neglected archives and hard-to-find resources. For all its careful scholarship, the book is a fine read. The discussion of Samuel Roth, perhaps the most notorious of all American pornographers, is itself worth the price of the book, because it allows Gertzman to speculate on the essential value of pornographers to a culture.

As someone who has dabbled in the erotica business, I highly
recommend this most enjoyable and readable volume to those both inside and outside the business. It is a work of scholarship that can be read and enjoyed by the general public as well. The censorship issues it raises are still with us today, in forms
more insidious than ever. I congratulate the author for delving into an area of our society most would prefer to ignore or avoid.

While this author has obviously researched this book emphatically, his personal closeness to the subject has left holes in the text that make the read a bumpy ride. Too much is assumed of the reader when historical fact is alluded to instead of described. I had hoped for a kind of insight into the history that still left me titillated but instead felt like I was in the surgery room of the local hospital. Some of the detail veered off the beaten path and made for a somewhat dry read.