Items

• Forth into light
  Impossibly handsome lovers Peter Martin and Charlie Mills continue to work out their complicated romance. Peter, Charlie and sometime heterosexual love interest Martha – the Mills-Martins – are long-established in comfortable family life, complete with children (named Charlotte and Peter after their respective fathers), but newcomer Jeff still creates tension. This is the concluding part of the bestselling erotic trilogy by Gordon Merrick (1916-1988), following ‘The Lord Won’t Mind’ (1970) and ‘One for the Gods’ (1971), which were also seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. It is set on an island in the Aegean in the 1950s. Merrick himself had moved to the island of Hydra in 1960.
• P.S. your cat is dead
  A darkly comic exploration of the burgeoning relationship between down-on-his-luck actor Jimmy Zoole and a gay cat burglar he finds looting his apartment. This is the third novel from author and playwright James Kirkwood (1924-1989). According to biographer Sean Egan, Kirkwood was inspired by a series of burglaries at his home on West 58th Street, New York. In their 1979-80 catalogue, Philadelphia bookstore Giovanni’s Room described ‘P.S. Your Cat is Dead’ as “our all-time bestselling gay men’s novel”. Kirkwood adapted it into a play in 1975 and in 2002, it was adapted again into a feature film, directed by Steve Guttenberg, which was rather less well-received. Kirkwood’s ‘There Must Be a Pony!’ was also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’.
• S-M : the last taboo
  The appearance of this book is reminiscent of a 1950s pulp novel, with its paperback cover and cheap, browning paper. It was published by Grove Press, a predominantly literary publisher of writers including John Rechy and Michael Rumaker, under their Evergreen Black Cat Book imprint. The authors are, presumably, a married couple, although there is very little information about them. It is also unclear whether the couple were involved in sadomasochism (which they prefer to term “s-m”) or distant researchers of it. At one point, in a section on purchasing s-m materials, they use the word “we”. The book aims to describe the “psychology, techniques, and accessories” of s-m. The final section, ‘From the Fields of Infamy’, presents literary examples of s-m, including by Charles Baudelaire and Pauline Réage.
• Women and madness
  Since publication in 1972, this feminist work on women’s psychology has sold over 2.5 million copies. Psychologist Phyllis Chesler (1940-) interviewed women who had been psychiatry or psychotherapy patients and wove their experiences into a book which explores the ways in which women are stigmatised, abused and oppressed by a patriarchal medical establishment. The book is held in multiple UK academic libraries. It is unclear which edition of the book was seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ – the Allen Lane edition is shown here – but more likely it was the 1973 version from the US mass market publisher Avon Books. Chesler sued the owners of Avon for publishing the book with differences from her original text.