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LICENTIOUS GOTHAM: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York / EXCERPT
LICENTIOUS GOTHAM: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York / EXCERPT
LICENTIOUS GOTHAM: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York / EXCERPT
GOTHAM
Erotic Publishing
and
Its Prosecution
in
Nineteenth-Century New York
N
Donna Dennis
H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England
2009
Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
2. Flash Weeklies 43
Notes 309
Acknowledgments 365
Index 000
vii
Introduction
N
I n the winter of 1855, a New York police offic er entered the base-
ment-level bookstore of John Atchison on Nassau Street in lower
Manhattan, just below City Hall. To many observers, Nassau had an
odd, old-world feel. “Crooked, contracted, unclean, with high houses
and low houses, marble palaces and dingy frames,” it reminded the
author of one nineteenth-century guidebook “more of a street in an
old Continental town than of a popular thoroughfare in the new Re-
public.” With a “strange stream of humanity” continually “flowing
and overflowing” through the street, it rated as “one of the most pe-
culiar and striking” spaces in the city. Among its other distinctions,
Nassau had long served as the center of New York’s printing and pub-
lishing trade, especially at the northern end of the street, where it in-
tersected with Fulton, Ann, Beekman, Spruce, and Frankfort, in the
area where Atchison’s shop was located. These blocks housed a dark,
congested warren of bookstores, print shops, secondhand and anti-
quarian book dealers, engravers, lithographers, stationers, job print-
ers, newspaper offices, and small and midsize publishing firms. Since
at least the 1840s, they had also functioned as the heart of the city’s
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cations. At the same time, the paper conveniently disclosed the ad-
dress of the bookseller and the title of the allegedly obscene book,
thereby providing curious readers with information about the forbid-
den text and precisely where to purchase it. If other obscenity prose-
cutions from the 1850s serve as any guide, Atchison’s case may have
increased the circulation of obscene books in a more immediate way.
Policemen, court employees, and other municipal officers were often
accused of pilfering confiscated books for their private perusal, shar-
ing them with friends, and even selling them on the open market.
Despite Mayor Wood’s assurances to the contrary, Atchison was
still doing business in obscene books seven years later. In 1862, in the
midst of the Civil War, he ran this thinly veiled advertisement for
erotica in the New York Clipper, a paper for sporting men, the back
pages of which pornography dealers favored: “BOOKS ON LOVE,
AS USUAL.—Catalogues sent free.”5 Significantly, by this time
Atchison had graduated from selling such books over (or probably
more accurately under) the counter to offering them by mail order.
In this respect, his practices followed the trend in the metropolitan
erotica trade as a whole. In the years leading up to the war, New York
dealers, in an effort to free themselves from the costs and constraints
of municipal obscenity regulation, had engineered a major reorienta-
tion of their business toward sales by mail.
One New York publisher, a savvy former bookbinder named
George Akarman, was particularly responsible for this transforma-
tion. By the mid-1850s, working out of a series of offices in the vicin-
ity of Nassau Street, Akarman was well on his way to becoming one
of the century’s largest producers of pornography, second only to a
legendary publisher of bawdy books named William Haines. The
prominence Akarman had in the erotic print trade meant that he op-
erated in the constant shadow of the law, where he was continually
confronted with raids on his publishing firm and with the threat of
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Chapter 1
“Beware of Print and
Fancy Goods Stores”
N
12
“Beware of Print and Fancy Goods Stores”
port from the Female Benevolent Society, he railed, “Our great cities
. . . are inundated with a flood of books and pictures vile enough to
make even licentiousness blush to look at them.” Surveying this ur-
ban scene, “one would think the devil had turned editor, and con-
verted hell itself into a printing office.” Such vile, satanic publi
cations, McDowall elaborated, contained the “most lust-exciting
representations and illustrations of pleasure that it is possible to
invent.” To protect against such evils, he cautioned parents to keep
their children away from traveling salesmen peddling books. “Be-
ware of the common pedlars who visit your abodes.” For city dwell-
ers, he added a special warning: “Beware of dashing dandy-youth.
Beware of print and fancy goods stores.”2
In New York, McDowall’s claims that prostitution and licentious
literature had reached epic proportions were widely denounced from
several quarters as grossly exaggerated. Indeed, rather than provok-
ing communal soul-searching or legal action against brothel keepers
and smut dealers, the moralist’s passion for exposing sexual wrongdo-
ing led to charges that he was guilty of indecency. The New York
elite thought that McDowall exhibited an improper, even perverse,
interest in revealing the inner workings of libertinism and in recit-
ing stories of “seduction, rape, and incest,” especially when he went
so far as to distribute his journal to the private residences of well-to-
do citizens. In a dramatic turn of events, after McDowall threatened
to publish the names of men who patronized brothels in 1834, a
grand jury condemned McDowall’s Journal (and by implication Mc-
Dowall himself) as a public nuisance for revealing “odious and re-
volting details” that were “offensive to taste, injurious to morals, and
degrading to the character of our City.”3
From then on, the popular press frequently cited McDowall’s Jour-
nal as a notorious example of a “filthy, foul mouthed, indecent, im-
moral” and “obscene” publication. Toward the end of his short life,
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14
“Beware of Print and Fancy Goods Stores”
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18
“Beware of Print and Fancy Goods Stores”
silks, china, jewelry, and books of diverse styles and genres. Many
of the books arrived as bound volumes ready for sale, while others
were shipped as printed sheets that needed only to be assembled by a
binder before being dispatched to import shops, book and print stores,
periodical depots, and street corner bookstands.
Faced with the request for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Bon-
fanti replied “without any hesitation” that he had it in stock. Given
his reputation as an importer, it is likely that the copy purchased at
his store was of English rather than American provenance. Although
the original London edition of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure did
not include pictures, English publishers commonly produced illus-
trated versions by the 1760s. The edition sold by Bonfanti was no ex-
ception: his indictment indicates that the sale of obscene engravings
furnished the basis for a separate charge against him. Specifically,
the indictment states that the book included certain “wicked, false,
feigned, lewd, impious, impure, bawdy, and obscene prints.” These
were said to represent “men and women with their private parts in
most indecent postures and attitudes and . . . in the act of carnal cop-
ulation in various attitudes and postures.” For this illustrated edition,
Bonfanti charged $3.50. That high price, equivalent in today’s terms
to roughly $65, signaled that it was a relatively luxurious commodity,
intended for the well-heeled customers of his fancy goods store.14
Bonfanti’s sale of Cleland’s erotic classic was not an isolated event,
either in New York or in neighboring states of New England. As early
as 1786, perhaps with the intention of printing his own edition, the
master printer Isaiah Thomas, Sr., of Worcester, Massachusetts,
sought to buy a copy from an English bookdealer. In 1817 the final
inventory of a New Hampshire bookseller named Anson Whipple,
who was affiliated with the Thomas firm, disclosed that he had 293
copies of the book in stock. In 1818 a resident of Concord, New
Hampshire, penned a complaint to the state governor asserting that
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“Beware of Print and Fancy Goods Stores”
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