Items

• A thirsty evil : seven short stories
  Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was a writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and screenplays, on a diverse range of subjects, published across many decades. Some of Vidal’s works centre on gay characters or themes, including some of the tales featured in this collection of seven stories. This edition, which was seized in the raids, was published by Gay Sunshine Press, although it is a reprint of the 1956 first edition published by Zero Press. Additionally, some of the stories had originally been published in magazines. Readers, therefore, had twenty-five years of access to this book’s contents prior to the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. The front cover shows an illustration by Joe Fuoco.
• True to life adventure stories. Vol. 1
  Judy Grahn (1940-) is a poet, lesbian feminist and advocate of women’s spirituality. She also wrote 1984’s ‘Another Mother Tongue’, a mythic queer history. In response to Grahn’s question, “what is a woman’s adventure story?”, this book presents stories by twenty writers which relate women’s direct experiences. Writing by working-class women is a strong feature of the collection, with an emphasis on maintaining the authors’ unedited natural language and spelling. The book was published by Diana Press, a feminist printing and publishing house founded in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik. The cover illustration is by Karen Sjöholm, who also worked at the Press. The Press was vandalised in 1977, with damage to plates, paste-ups, books and machines. It closed in 1979.