Trial of D[e Robigne]. M[ortimer]. Bennett…Upon the Charge of Depositing Prohibited Matter in the Mail.
[Birth Control]. Trial of D[e Robigne]. M[ortimer]. Bennett…Upon the Charge of Depositing Prohibited Matter in the Mail. In the United States Circuit Court, Judge Charles L. Benedict, Presiding, New York, March 18, 19, 20, and 21, 1879…reported by S.B. Hinsdale, official stenographer of the court. New York: The Truth Seeker Office, [1879].
8vo.; brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; lightly rubbed; wear to extremities.
First edition of this defense published after the trial of D.M. Bennett on charges of circulating obscenity; undated publisher’s ads in the rear.
Radical publisher D.M. Bennett (1818-1882) promoted liberal social and political issues in his journal, The Truth Seeker, which Anthony Comstock, as Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, wished to shut down. Among the offensive material Comstock cited were articles such as “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ” and “How do Marsupials Propagate their Kind?” The case against Bennett was ultimately dismissed, but when he sold several copies of Cupid’s Yokes on behalf of fellow bookseller Josephine Tilton, Comstock seized upon the opportunity to bring him up on obscenity charges. (Cupid’s Yokes was an early tract on birth control by radical abolitionist and reformer Ezra Hervey Heywood, who wrote a large number of pamphlets on women, marriage, women’s rights and reform.) The trial was farcical: the charges were ill-defined, the materials in question were not distributed or even read to the jury, and any reasonable defense was prohibited by Judge Charles L. Benedict. This volume prints an explanatory preface, trial transcripts, letters written to and printed in various periodicals, and Judge Benedict’s sentence of thirteen months hard labor and a $300 fine.
A rare book: the NUC suggests that there might be a copy at the Library of Congress (the entry leaves some doubt) but certainly nowhere else.
(#3729)
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