SOURCE: Goodman, Michael B. “The Customs' Censorship of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.” Critique 22, no. 1 (1980): 92-104.

[In the following essay, Goodman discusses the process by which Burroughs's novel was seized by the U.S. Customs Service in 1959 and subsequently banned as an obscene work.]

With its descriptions of violent eroticism, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) hit a sensitive cultural nerve more forcefully than other books which discussed sex explicitly. It dealt vividly with the interrelationship of sex and violence, with sex and cannibalism, with bestiality, and with homosexual exploitation. Through his caricatures of sexual motivation, Burroughs made associations which were intolerable for a society which perceived sex as related to affection. Like Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch was first published in Paris because of the American censorship of sexual discussion. Copies of the 1959 Olympia Press edition mailed to Grove Press in New York were confiscated by the United States Customs Service. Since the agents acted without the direction of a hearing to determine the book's obscenity, it became another literary work censored by government officials executing their duty as if they were judges and the arbiters of public taste. The Customs' ban on Burroughs' book lasted beyond its United States publication and exemplifies the power the government once exercised in order to protect the American reader from himself. A brief discussion of the background, however, will explain why the book was considered obscene and seized as contraband.

In the Spring of 1957 Allen Ginsberg took Burroughs' “rather bulky, pasted-up manuscript”¹ to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias who rejected it as almost inaccessible to the average reader because of its disregard for the conventions of fiction. A section of the work was sent to Black Mountain Review and published in its final issue. Another section was sent to The Chicago Review whose editors greeted the material with excitement. To them Burroughs' prose was unique and forceful, and an excerpt titled “from Naked Lunch” appeared in the Spring 1958 issue, followed by another excerpt in the Autumn issue. Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley read the Autumn issue and blasted its contents in a front-page article as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I've seen publically circulated.”² He urged the trustees of the University of Chicago to look at the magazine. They did, and subsequently suppressed the stories by Burroughs, Kerouac, and Dahlberg scheduled for the Winter issue. The Chicago Review editors, Irving Rosenthal and six others, resigned in protest of the University's suppression of literary freedom. A student-government investigation of the actions supported their censorship claim. Responding to the charge, Trustee Fairfax M. Cone explained, “Rosenthal and his witless friends were required to stop publishing obscenities that no university could condone in a student publication.”³ The appearance of the words “shit,” “fuck,” and “cunt” persuaded the University to stop the issue.

Paul Carroll, former editor of The Chicago Review, planned a new literary magazine, one of the first of hundreds to appear and disappear in the artistic turbulence of the 1960's. In response to the censorship trouble at the University, he allowed the first issue of Big Table to publish the entire contents of the suppressed issue of the literary review. When the controversial material was finally published, it met unexpected trouble. Albert Podell, the Big Table business manager, deposited several hundred copies at the Chicago Post Office for second-class mailing and filled out the forms required for the reduced rate. According to postal clerk Joseph F. Kozielec, Podell failed to provide him with a specific number of subscribers verified by an accompanying list of addresses. Only then did he look into the contents of the magazine and question its “mailability,” the term used to define items allowed through the mail. He informed his superiors of his suspicion on 3 April 1959,⁴ but the official notification that the issue might be barred from the mail was not given to Big Table until May 14th. On that date Kozielec delivered a Post Office Department letter dated April 30th to Podell and attorney Joel Sprayregen informing them of a hearing scheduled to determine the mailability of Big Table No. 1.

At the hearing Sprayregen argued for the constitutional rights and literary merit of the fledgling magazine. The ruling, however, went in favor of the Post Office, and Big Table was banned from the mail. Sprayregen contested the decision, but the postal ban was upheld. A complaint was immediately filed in Illinois Federal District Court requesting that the case be heard on summary judgment. Big Table did not question the facts set forth at the hearing, but the decision based on them. Federal Judge Julius J. Hoffman reviewed the case, evaluating the evidence and the legal precedent, and concluded the Post Office decision applied the law incorrectly and ordered the magazine released.⁵ Hoffman's decision lifted an eighteen-month ban.

The suppression of the Burroughs material by the University of Chicago and the subsequent actions taken against Big Table No. 1 inspired Olympia Press publisher Girodias to reconsider his previous rejection of the manuscript of Naked Lunch. By the end of July 1959 an English language French edition of the book was available outside the United States.

Grove Press was interested in publishing Naked Lunch ever since parts of it appeared in The Chicago Review. After Girodias published the book, Grove requested a copy of the edition and expressed its desire to publish it in the United States. Informed that copies of the book had never arrived in New York, Fran Muller of Olympia wrote on 21 September 1959: “I am surprised to hear that you did not receive the copies of The Naked Lunch we have sent to you.”⁶ Mildly alarmed on receipt of this information, Judith Schmidt of Grove replied to Miriam Worms of Olympia on 14 October 1959 with the suspicion that the book might have been seized by Customs inspectors.⁷ At that time the obscenity of Burroughs' excerpt in Big Table No. 1 was being appealed before Judge Hoffman. The contents of the magazine were still considered obscene because the rulings of the Post Office had not then been overturned.⁸ In addition to the past litigation, the Customs' tenacious enforcement of obscenity laws made the possibility of a seizure at the border quite real for Judith Schmidt. Alarm, then, was not a groundless response when a copy of the book did not arrive from Paris.

Since no word from Customs came to her, Schmidt explained her suspicions to Worms and requested that she send copies of the Olympia Naked Lunch “in a plain wrapper, by air mail,” adding that “at least we'll know by its arrival or non-arrival, if it's the French or American authorities who are stopping it.”⁹ Presumably Schmidt believed that the U.S. Customs would suspect an unmarked package from Paris sent to Grove Press of containing contraband books. The seizure of certain French books was not uncommon, but the publishers were confused about which government initiated the action against Naked Lunch. Previous actions by Customs may have added to their confusion.¹⁰

Also on 14 October 1959 Joel Sprayregen, the attorney handling the Big Table ban, wrote to Grove's lawyer Charles Rembar filling him in on the actions against the magazine.¹¹ Because of the publisher's plans for Burroughs' work, the information was at once welcomed and ominous. The censorship action guaranteed interest in the book, while simultaneously indicating a costly court battle. If Big Table No. 1 were vindicated in court, nothing prevented individual municipalities and states from further censorship action against the whole of Naked Lunch. Just such legal cat-and-mouse entangled Tropic of Cancer when Grove published it in America. Fifty suits greeted Miller's work,¹² making the publisher quite cautious with Burroughs' book. Grove was also embroiled in a fight to reverse the Post Office ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover. In spite of its caution, Grove was in the vanguard of the fight against literary censorship in the late 1950's and early 1960's.

Judith Schmidt continued her requests for copies from Paris, hoping to secure one on which to base the American edition and comply with Burroughs' desire to have the French edition serve as the authority. Since all copies sent to the office address, as well as ones sent to her home address and that of publisher Barney Rosset, failed to arrive, she was forced to conclude that their mail was being monitored by the Customs Service. Even though Grove had received a typescript of the book by 1 April 1960, Schmidt continued to request copies from France because Grove was now obtaining them for the several American individuals who wanted the book. In order to eliminate Grove as the middleman, Schmidt sent the addresses of those people directly to Olympia and sent a form letter to those requesting a copy which explained that Grove was securing Naked Lunch by having Olympia mail it directly.¹³ In this way Schmidt hoped to circumvent the need of sending the book to the Grove Press address which she believed was being monitored by the Customs.

The first official indication that Naked Lunch had been classified as obscene and confiscated came on 29 August 1960, almost ten months after the seizure of the book was first suspected. On that date three notices were sent from Customs Deputy Collector Irving Fishman to Barney Rosset informing him that a total of five copies had been seized.¹⁴ At the time of the seizures, obscenity cases were almost exclusively handled by Fishman in New York and Reuben Klaben in Washington. Fishman was tough on obscene material and boasted, “In the past fifteen years … we have had only a few tentative protests” of obscene material seized by Customs. “But in not one case has the complaint gotten as far as the courtroom.”¹⁵

Under Title 19, Section 1305 of the U.S. Code, commonly referred to as the Tariff Act of 1930, the Service is required to prevent specified items from entering the United States: the law bars “any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing … or other article which is obscene or immoral.”¹⁶ In 1960 that meant sexually explicit or “dirty” books of the type often smuggled into the country by adventurous individuals in handbags or under coats and dresses. For quite some time smuggling was the only way an American in his own country could obtain works by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, or Henry Miller. Recently other contraband has replaced the printed word in its power to evoke fear, shame, disgust, and outrage, but in 1960 the printed word, especially its illegal or improper use, set massive agencies into motion.

The official procedure of the Customs in executing the mandate of Section 1305 calls for a random examination of three percent of all packages arriving at the port.¹⁷ If any item is considered “obscene,” the U.S. Attorney is notified and files an action in Federal District Court; a judicial rather than an administrative determination is made whether or not the material is obscene by contemporary standards. The Customs also considered the seal on first-class mail from overseas inviolate. Suspected mail was only opened and inspected after receiving authorization from the addressee. If no consent were given to open and inspect the contents, Customs returned the package to the sender. In the seizure of Naked Lunch it appears plausible that the book was detected by some method other than chance.

Unconvinced by the probability of a random inspection to uncover a specific title, one might speculate that the involvement of the Customs in the Naked Lunch case was a result of the routine monitoring of the international correspondence of publishers reputed to handle so-called “dirty books.” John Atwood of the Restricted Materials Branch of the Customs Service was asked, in an effort to verify this notion, how Customs could single out a package with a book in it for inspection.¹⁸ He replied that cases such as the Naked Lunch seizure were usually the result of an individual Customs officer using, according to Atwood, “alert methods and techniques.” He was then asked to comment on an example involving Grove Press and Olympia Press in an effort to obtain a more satisfying explanation of the bureaucratic description of the Customs' detection methods. He was told that at the time of the seizure Girodias and the Olympia Press enjoyed a worldwide reputation as a publisher of avant-garde and sexually explicit books—books that some considered obscene. Barney Rosset's Grove Press daringly published innovative and sometimes sexually frank books like Lady Chatterley's Lover in the United States when other houses refused. Atwood was asked if the reputations of these two publishers were enough to alert the officers of the Customs and warrant monitoring of the overseas correspondence between them for suspected contraband books. To this specific characterization of the Customs' methods, Atwood replied calmly, “I'd rather not comment on that.” It seems quite clear that specific details of the “altert methods and techniques” remain closely kept information.

However, once a book was suspected of being obscene, the procedure was relatively simple. The work under suspicion was sent to Huntington Cairns,¹⁹ who acted as a literary consultant to the Customs Service. He in turn notified Reuben Klaben and Irving Fishman whether, in his opinion, the book in question was liable under the Tariff Act. How was a particular book selected and obtained for Cairns' evaluation? The illusive “alert methods and techniques” mentioned by Atwood seem to provide the answer.

The method outlined above suggests that the mail of suspected recipients of obscene material was routinely monitored. Atwood would not comment on this notion, either to confirm or deny its possibility. In the Customs' file on Naked Lunch no documents appear which would disprove the monitoring of packages.²⁰ Since part of the file is missing, direct supporting evidence is irretrievable. A conjecture based on the facts and circumstances which remain is not improper. Considering the experience of Judith Schmidt and Miriam Worms in attempting to mail Naked Lunch from Paris to New York, one unavoidably concludes that the Customs Service routinely monitored the packages sent between the two publishers. It is ludicrous to believe that the routine, random inspection of three percent of all packages would net identical contraband books sent to the home and business addresses of both Barney Rosset and Judith Schmidt over a period of months. Evidence which would indicate the manner in which the book was detected does not exist in the file. However, an incident which occurred around that time involving the seizure of an Olympia Press book helps to clarify the Customs' attitude toward the French publications.

Daniel Bell, former Fortune editor, member of the A.C.L.U. Board of Directors, and resident at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, returned from a trip to Europe in the Fall of 1958. At the Port of New York, a Customs inspector confiscated his copy of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, purchased in France, a book published by Olympia Press. According to Bell, when he opened his bag the inspector saw the distinctive green color of the unhidden book and immediately said, “Oh, you have there some of those Parisian books.”²¹ The inspector told him that “all Olympia Press books are confiscated on the presumptive basis that they are obscene.”²² When Bell pressed the inspector to affirm the existence of a list of contraband books, he said yes and escorted him to an office where another officer showed it to him. The inspectors did not inform him of his right to contest the seizure of the book but asked him to sign a form authorizing its destruction.

Bell wrote the A.C.L.U. of his experience. They in turn contacted Irving Fishman of the Customs in New York for an explanation. The A.C.L.U. had heard of instances of the Post Office confiscating all the titles of a publisher, but not the Customs. Questioned by Mel Wulf, Fishman stated that there “is no list of books to be seized and there is no instruction requiring all Olympia Press publications to be seized.”²³ However, Fishman did offer an explanation for the action: “Over the course of time” inspectors “have found so many books printed by Olympia to be excludable that they might seize them all on the hunch that it' is probably obscene.”²⁴ Informed of Fishman's reply, Bell insisted on the existence of the list and the Olympia Press policy based on his experience.

A.C.L.U. Executive Director Patrick Malin then wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Robert B. Anderson on 30 December 1958 informing him of Bell's experience.²⁵ Malin objected to the apparent policy of seizing all works published by Olympia Press on the presumption of obscenity as contrary to the American tradition that each person and publication be judged individually. He objected to the existence of a list of contraband books, because it implied their obscenity by administrative fiat and not judicial decree. He also complained of the Customs' negligence in informing an individual of his right to protest a seizure.

The A.C.L.U. received an acknowledgement of their letter and the promise of a full reply. On 20 January 1959, after no reply, the A.C.L.U. politely urged an answer. When none came Malin wrote again on 10 March 1959, explaining that if no reply were forthcoming the A.C.L.U. would be forced to release the story to the press. On 16 March 1959 (about the same time Big Table No. 1 was deposited in the Chicago Post Office for mailing) Assistant Secretary of the Treasury A. Gilmore Flues replied to Malin that although the book in question was obscene under Section 1305, the Commissioner of Customs was releasing the book to Bell for purposes of research. Flues denied the charge of a blanket ban on Olympia Press books: “While this firm also publishes books found to be obscene within the meaning of section 305 of the Tariff Act, it is not our practice either to list or to bar all books published by it.”²⁶ Malin then thanked Flues in a letter of March 30th and asked him to issue guidelines to inspectors to avoid recurrence of the Bell incident. The Treasury Department replied that the event was the exception rather than the rule and informed the A.C.L.U. that the New York Customs had been advised of the inadvertence of the inspector to inform Bell of his rights.²⁷ Bell got his book back, even though the Customs denied any central list of banned books, a blanket ban on Olympia Press, or improprieties in procedure.

Aside from illustrating the workings of the Customs, the Bell incident is linked to the seizure of Naked Lunch in a surprising way. Government agencies place a code on communications for filing and reference. On both letters sent from the Treasury Department to the A.C.L.U. concerning the Bell matter (16 March and 20 May 1959) the code “PEN 633.11” appears. On the papers in the Customs' file on Naked Lunch appears the code “PEN 633.11K.” Since the Bell seizure preceded the Naked Lunch seizure by more than a year, the similar code numbers indicate that the Customs perceived a relationship between the two books, most likely that both were publications of Olympia Press. The circumstances of the seizures of Naked Lunch indicate that the Customs Service was indeed on the alert for any book published by the Paris house. Contrary to the denial of the Treasury Department, Fishman's suggestion that his agents suspected the ugly green books as obscene from long experience reveals an unofficial operating procedure in force for both mail and passenger packages. Some years later, after consulting with Fishman, J. A. Sigler wrote:

There does exist, for internal use, a file of titles and a list of the disposition made in specific cases. From time to time instructions are issued from the Washington headquarters to collectors of customs which serve as guidelines, but for the most part these are by way of comment on current interpretations by the Federal Courts.²⁸

Keeping an unofficial list on court actions might be another method used by Customs to detect obscene material. Use of this method might have alerted collectors to the possible obscene nature of Naked Lunch without knowledge of its association with Olympia Press.

A reference to the Big Table case and its relationship to Burroughs' book in a Customs Service memo of 2 October 1962 to Fishman shows that close attention was paid to Federal cases involving obscenity charges.²⁹ Customs checked for the possibility of those books appearing as contraband. The same memo also refers to the publication of Naked Lunch in the U.S. by Grove Press. That fact was mentioned in the correspondence to Customs of a recipient of contraband material and demonstrates that letters were painstakingly combed for leads to contraband. It also indicates that a concerted effort was made by the agency to stop the flow of obscene books.

When Big Table No. 1 was detained by the Post Office for a hearing to determine its “mailability,” the official notice of the hearing was sent on 30 April 1959 by Richard Farr, Acting Assistant General Counsel for Fraud and Mailability. Unexpectedly a revealing name appears at the bottom of the notice as one recipient of a carbon copy, indicating that a strong and vigorous working relationship existed between the Post Office and the Customs on obscenity related matters. A copy of the notice of hearing was sent to “Mr. R. Klaben, Bur. Cus., Tres. Dept.”³⁰ Reuben Klaben, of course, handled matters of obscenity for the Customs along with Irving Fishman. The routine notification alerted Customs of the possibility that the book could qualify as contraband. The notice of April 30th alerted Customs of the possible obscenity of Naked Lunch even before Girodias decided to publish it, since it was not until June of 1959 that he contacted Burroughs seeking another look at the manuscript,³¹ almost a month and one half after Klaben received his copy of the notice. The Customs Service, then, clearly knew of Burroughs' work and had cause to consider it obscene even before it was published by Olympia Press.

The action begun by the Post Office against the material in Big Table No. 1 ended with Judge Hoffman's decision on 30 June 1960 to overturn the ban. Because the decision came in Illinois Federal District Court, the Customs Service re-examined its earlier ruling that Naked Lunch was obscene,³² but continued to adhere to it nevertheless. Customs later reiterated its position in a letter of 21 February 1961: “The Bureau is still of the opinion that the book The Naked Lunch is obscene under section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930.”³³ The independent decision of the Customs to continue to consider Naked Lunch as contraband in spite of the removal of the postal ban on the excerpt in Big Table No. 1 should not obfuscate the strong cooperation of the two agencies in identifying and apprehending obscene books.

The publication of the American edition of Naked Lunch on 30 November 1962 generated a great deal of interest in the literary and legal communities. Shortly before the U.S. publication, Huntington Cairns requested that Reuben Klaben give him the Paris edition so that he could once more review the book and make a new recommendation on its obscenity.³⁴ Klaben in turn asked Fishman to forward a copy. Along with the book Fishman sent a memo reminding Klaben of the opinion of 21 February 1961 that “the book was obscene under section 305”³⁵ in spite of the lifting of the Post Office ban against the excerpt in Big Table. Two months later Fishman requested notification of any change in the ruling on the book, adding that it had been published in the U.S. by Grove Press.³⁶

In February 1963, about a month after Theodore Mavrikos was arrested in Boston for selling a copy of Naked Lunch to undercover vice-squad officers,³⁷ Harold F. Shapiro of the U.S. Attorney General's office sent the following statement to the Commissioner of Customs: “It is the opinion of this division that it would not be appropriate or desirable to institute forfeiture proceedings under section 305 of the Tariff Act against copies of the above-named book” (The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs) “which have been seized and detained by Collectors.”³⁸ The book was then ordered released to the persons from whom it was seized, effectively cancelling the ban and bringing to an informal end the Federal censorship of Naked Lunch—almost simultaneously with the beginning of censorship action in Boston.

The experience of Naked Lunch with the United States Customs Service illustrates a conscious abridgment of free literary expression. Its censorship might be dismissed as an unfortunate excess if it were an isolated case, but the circumvention of judicial determination was standard practice. Books which should have been allowed a hearing were characterized as contraband by administrative fiat. Most of those rulings went unchallenged because of the time, expense, and embarrassment of a trial. The Customs' censorship of Naked Lunch emphasizes the necessity to guard the right of free expression as an integral part of American democracy.

Notes

1. Maurice Girodias, “Confessions of a Booklegger's Son,” Censorship (Summer 1965), p. 10. Other information on the Paris publication is from Girodias to Michael Goodman, 21 June 1976, in my possession.

2. Jack Mabley, “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” Chicago Daily News, 25 October 1958, p. 1.

3. Fairfax M. Cone, “Letters to the Editor,” Saturday Review, 1 August 1959, p. 25.

4. For Kozielec's testimony, see “Big Table Issue 1, Spring 1959, Post Office Department Docket No. 1/150,” Hearing Transcript, pp. 29-37.

5. “Big Table, Inc. vs. Carl A. Schroeder, U.S. Postmaster for Chicago, Illinois,” 186 Federal Supplement 254.

6. Fran Muller to Judith Schmidt, 21 September 1959, Grove Press Collection: Burroughs, Box No. 1, “Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. Editorial Correspondence No. 2. 1962-1967,” in the George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University.

7. Judith Schmidt to Miriam Worms, 14 October 1959, Grove Press Collection: Burroughs, Box No. 1, “Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. Editorial Correspondence No. 1. 1959-1962,” Syracuse University.

8. See Duvall's “Initial Decision” and Ablard's “Departmental Decision” in either the Post Office Department's file “Big Table, Docket No. 1/150,” or in the A.C.L.U. Archives, Box 38, folder 3, Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

9. Schmidt to Worms, 14 October 1959.

10. Paul Boyer, Purity in Print (New York: Scribner's, 1968), p. 209. Boyer quotes the New York Times for 23 January 1924 and concludes: “In 1923, French erotica was excluded with special diligence, not from a sudden access of prudery among Customs inspectors, but because the Franco-American Board of Commerce and Industry, suspecting that such books were giving Americans a distorted idea of France, had secured the cooperation of the Customs Bureau in a campaign to bar them at the ports.”

11. Joel J. Sprayregen to Charles Rembar, 14 October 1959, Grove Press Collection: Burroughs, Box No. 1, “Naked Lunch. Editorial Correspondence No. 1,” Syracuse University.

12. E. R. Hutchinson, “Tropic of Cancer” on Trial: A Case History of Censorship (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 1-2.

13. Some of the recipients of the form letter were Dr. Milton Schwebel, William Barrett, Nat Waldman, and Ephriam London. Schmidt to the above, 1 April 1960, Grove Press Collection: Burroughs, Box No. 1, “Naked Lunch. Editorial Correspondence No. 1,” Syracuse University.

14. Irving Fishman to Barney Rosset, 29 August 1960, Grove Press Collection. The numbers on the three letters of seizure are: 8451/2/3-6; 8499-60; 8464-60.

    The Customs Service retains a file on Naked Lunch in both New York and Washington, D.C. Both files were released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. The files are identical in content except for two memos, 14 March 1963 and 2 October 1962, in the New York file which do not appear in the Washington file. The files provided by Customs are suspiciously incomplete, only beginning in 1962, almost two years after the book was officially seized. The file provided is so incomplete that it does not even contain a copy of the 29 August 1960 notice of seizure. An additional request from Customs yielded nothing (see note 20 below), not even confirmation that the rest of the file had been lost or destroyed. The publication records of Grove Press at Syracuse University and the A.C.L.U. Archive at Princeton University were used to supplement the deficiencies of the Customs file.

    Since the Customs files on Naked Lunch are so sketchy, some of the specific motives and actions suggested here are based on similar seizures, circumstantial evidence, and conjecture.

15. Richard McGowen, “Smut Dealers: How Far Can They Go?” New York Daily News, 20 March 1959, p. 36. This article was the last in a series dealing with the pornography industry and reported that the six hundred Customs inspectors in the Restricted Merchandise Division worked effectively against smut: “Without concerning themselves with the dissenting of judges, when they spot something they regard as obscene they set it aside for burning.” That attitude came from Fishman who expressed the feeling that the courts were too soft in their rulings on what constituted obscenity in statements before a Senate subcomittee on juvenile delinquency.

16. In James C. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), pp. 347-48. The statute allows classics of literary or scientific merit only if they are “imported for non-commercial purposes.” The law also excludes works which advocate insurrection against the U.S., drugs and articles used for abortion and contraception, and lottery tickets.

17. The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970, p. 392. We can assume that the procedures described in the Report are similar to the ones in force in 1959.

18. Personal notes on a telephone conversation between John Atwood of the Restricted Materials Department of the U.S. Customs and Michael Goodman, 18 May 1976, 2:20-2:40 p.m. I found Mr. Atwood to be a cautious, skeptical, polite, and realistic civil servant. Aside from being evasive on the specifics of Customs' methods, he was most helpful with other questions and clarified the procedure for obtaining records through the Freedom of Information Act.

19. Paul, Federal Censorship, pp. 68-69.

20. In a letter of 23 August 1976 I asked the Customs Service to verify the completeness of the file sent to me and provided several alternative subject headings for additional searches. Acting Director of Entry Procedures and Penalties, E. J. Doyle, replied: “The files disclosed no further records. Because of changing concepts and positions in the obscenity field over the years, much of the material accumulated in this field by the Customs Service was destroyed as having no application to casework of a legal nature upon the retirement of Mr. Irving Fishman and Mr. Reuben Klaben, both of whom handled these cases exclusively for many years.” The letter implies that the Burroughs' file was one of many to be discarded. I am still not sure why only part of the file was destroyed and not all of it.

21. Dan Bell to Alan Reitman, 17 November 1958, A.C.L.U. Archives at Princeton University, 1959, Vol. 23, “Customs Bureau Seizures of Olympia Press Books.” Bell subsequently wrote on the incident: “What You Can't Read to Your Daughter,” New Leader, 42, No. 1 (25 May 1959), 23-24.

22. Ibid.

23. Al Reitman to Dan Bell, 13 November 1958, A.C.L.U. Archives at Princeton, 1959, Vol. 23.

24. Ibid.

25. Patrick Malin to Robert Anderson, 30 December 1958, A.C.L.U. Archives at Princeton, 1959, Vol. 23.

26. A. Gilmore Flues to Patrick Malin, 16 March 1959, A.C.L.U. Archives at Princeton, 1959, Vol. 23. Section 305 of the Tariff Act is the same as Title 19, Section 1305 of the U.S. Code.

27. D. Upton to Patrick Malin, 20 May 1959, A.C.L.U. Archives at Princeton, 1959, Vol. 23.

28. J. A. Sigler, “Customs Censorship,” Cleveland-Marshall Law Review, 15 (January 1966), 63. Sigler quotes from a letter he received from Irving Fishman dated 10 February 1965. We can assume that Fishman was the source of information on the existence of an informal list of books.

29. In the U.S. Customs file on Naked Lunch. This memo is only in the New York file.

30. Richard Farr to Albert Podell, 30 April 1959, in the Post Office Department file on Big Table, Docket No. 1/150.

31. Maurice Girodias to William Burroughs, 6 June 1959, in the Spencer Library at the University of Kansas.

32. Even though the supporting materials no longer exist, it is safe to conclude from the seizure of the book that its obscenity had been determined by the Customs Service.

33. Quoted in the memo of 2 October 1962 in the U.S. Customs file. As far as I have been able to determine, the letter of 21 February 1961 has been destroyed along with all material before October 1962.

34. Reuben Klaben to Irving Fishman, 1 October 1962, U.S. Customs file.

35. Fishman to Klaben, 4 October 1962, U.S. Customs file.

36. Fishman to Klaben, 4 December 1962, U.S. Customs file.

37. Personal notes on a telephone conversation between Detective (Retired) Edmund Griffin of the Boston Police and Michael Goodman, 24 May 1976, 4:35-5:00 p.m.

38. Harold Shapiro to Customs, 15 February 1963, U.S. Customs file.