I started work on my book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History in Jan 2002, largely prompted by the death of Tom Chantrell in July 2001 and the sense that there was an unexplored history there worth investigating. The first draft was completed in July 2003 and I then spent the next two years trying to persuade someone to publish it, finally getting lucky when Rebecca Barden arrived at the BFI in June 2005 (our first meeting was just a week after the 7/7 bombings and travelling into town still felt distinctly edgy). The final edit was approved in Nov 2005, and was as up-to-date as I could then make it, containing details like WE Berry’s collapse in Dec 2003, Eric Pulford’s death in July 2005, and the (prophetic) contemporary closure of Fred Zentner’s Cinema Bookshop etc etc. So what else has been lost in the two decades since I…

Continue reading British Film Posters: An Illustrated Epilogue 2005 – 2025 [Updated February 2026]

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…

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10)  Into the Provinces – The Private Shops 1978-82

Before launching into Mr Sullivan’s unique escapades it will be useful to first sketch in the landscape that immediately preceded them, and this means briefly revisiting Appendix B of the already-discussed (and top secret) Dec 1969 Customs Report “List of Importers Concerned With Indecent or Obscene Books”.  At first glance the two pages in question merely offer a bland A-Z of apparently random names and addresses, but a closer look seems to reveal an existing – if still fairly sketchy – national network of covert smut-distribution.  Let’s crunch some numbers.

There are 54 individual names listed, but many are attached to the same handful of addresses, hinting at a maze of diversionary tactics and/or frontmen. Conversely, a few names are linked to multiple local addresses, again perhaps suggesting deliberate home / warehouse type subterfuges. If we cut through this bewildering muddle…

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9)  Soho Typescripts – Homegrown Filth 1954-74

One key Soho name that has already cropped up a few times is that of Ron ‘The Dustman’ Davey, and it is finally time to meet him in person.  Davey (1913 – ???) was “an engagingly sociable giant of man… well able to look after himself” (very few successful pornographers seem to have been weedy seven-stone introverts) who was simultaneously a dustman for Hammersmith Council and a popular member of the Surrey Downs Sun Club in Farley Green, a nudist club first set up in 1941.  John Hawkesford, spotting a commercial opportunity, suggested Ron might like to take a few photographs of willing female Sun Club members to sell in his bookshops, and this soon progressed to ‘doubles’ and then women wrestling – “very popular at the time” as Davey later cheerfully recalled.  The obvious next step was producing actual books.

We need to pause briefly here to consider the technology involved. As…

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8)  Soho Barons – W1 Retailers 1954-82

As noted, Holywell Street – a narrow, overcrowded thoroughfare running behind the Strand’s north side between the churches of St Mary Le Strand and St Clement Danes – was for about 200 years the centre of London’s Dirty Book trade, crammed with shady establishments run by many of the characters we have already met, from Curll to Cannon to Dugdale and beyond.  However in 1902 a major scheme to widen the Strand saw it totally demolished and no trace of it remains today.  If you stand in front of Thorneycroft’s 1905 statue of Gladstone outside St Clement Danes, and follow the direction of his disgusted gaze, you are staring directly down the obliterated street.

Soho had been associated with prostitution since the early C18th, but did not begin to gradually fill up with Dirty Bookshops until after Holywell Street was pulled down. Early…

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7)  Redrupped – The Yanks 1967-1989

Our American cousins have always been slightly ahead of us in terms of progressive literary decensorship, partly because their First Amendment constitutionally protects Free Speech (although precisely what sorts of Speech might or might not be protected has been hotly debated over the years). The US counterpart of European pioneers Girodias and Calder is really Barney Rosset (1922-2012) whose Grove Press (1951-85) was the first to break the American ban on Chatterley (1959) and Tropic of Cancer (1961), before going on to publish numerous groundbreaking modern classics. Major legal battles had always ended up with the Supreme Court, who by the 1960s had developed a three-pronged test of obscenity: it had to (i) appeal to the prurient interest, (ii) be patently offensive, and (iii) lack any redeeming social value. When called upon to adjudicate Fanny Hill’s merits in 1966 (via the entertainingly-named Memoirs vs…

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6)  For the Public Good – Key Trials (ii) 1960-76

The prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Old Bailey in November 1960 has long since passed into British pop-cultural folklore, and is now the one Dirty Book trial that practically everybody has at least vaguely heard of. Entire books have been written about the case (and several radio and TV dramatizations broadcast), to the extent that there is really very little new to say about it, and the present account will confine itself to the basics. DH Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote three versions of Chatterley over the late 1920s, the last being the strongest in terms of content, and for thirty years the most notorious book of its generation was thus published solely on the continent (initially in 1928). The uncut version was eventually dramatically tried and acquitted in America in July 1959, and the immediate lesson was obvious: there…

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5)  The Great Purge and the Jenkins Act 1954-59

By 1954 Lord Campbell’s original 1857 Obscene Publications Act was fast approaching its centenary, but few felt it in any particular need of updating.  Occasionally, as we have seen, seriously-intended books fell victim to it, but this was typically because (deliberately or otherwise) they provocatively nudged the boundaries of their era in terms of frankness.  The real strength of the existing law from a prosecutor’s point of view was that it provided no DEFENCE for Obscenity – juries were simply invited to recognise it and act accordingly.  Providing the police didn’t get carried away and begin behaving oppressively, the status quo inevitably prevailed.

Various theories have been put forward to explain the origins of what subsequently became known as the Great Purge, but it was likely a combination of several disparate factors arising year or so earlier. In June 1953 an…

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4)  Published in Paris – Olympia Press and Co. 1929-1965

One obvious option for the more adventurous / bohemian UK publisher keen to avoid domestic arrest was simply to print his material elsewhere then try and smuggle it back into England through the post. Paris was the natural destination of choice for such itinerant smut-peddlers, partly due to its simple proximity (the gear only had to be got through UK Customs at one of the Channel ports), and partly due to laissez-faire Gallic indifference – our French cousins have long considered it beneath them to be able to read any language other than their own, and habitually turned a blind eye to what a few Anglais ex-pats might have been up to around Rue Saint Honore. However this mini-hive of industry didn’t really get going until the 1930s, when one shrewd publisher grasped the possibilities of the city’s endless swirling…

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3)  To Deprave and Corrupt – Key Trials (i) 1868-1954

The difficulty with discussing Obscenity trials is that they broadly fall into two categories: those of things like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (DH Lawrence 1928) which are already well documented, and those of things like Lady Bumtickler’s Revels (John Camden Hotton 1872) which are not. Clearly Lady Chatterley has rather more gravitas than Lady Bumtickler, but is she in truth any more historically significant? Well yes, alright, I suppose she is, but where’s the fun in that? Nevertheless there is a serious point to be made here about deliberately buried history. The trials of workaday Dirty Books are largely undocumented simply because they are judged to be of no value. In contrast the trials of Serious Literature are endlessly pored over, typically in tones of affected amazement at the philistinism of their prosecutors. Ho hum. Still, the historic travails of Literature…

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