An Outline History of the Post Office Censorship, including 12 brief case histories and 20 conflicting types of court decisions. This was published by the National Council on Freedom from Censorship, 100 Fifth Ave., in 1932 (and from what I can determine it seems as though the Council was organized/supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. 11x8.5", 29 leaves. Offset printing from typed originals, and staple bound. Original wrappers. Provenance: the property of Henry Louis Mencken, and then the Library of Congress; Mencken gave the pamphlet to the LC on 21 Sept 1932, so stated in pencil on the back of the cover. This is one of about 100 such items that came to me from the purchase of a group called "the Pamphlet Collections". Condition: nice copy, with the LC surplus/duplicate stamp on the rear page, and a small (6mm) perforated "LC" at the bottom of the front page. There is an old horizontal fold in this--as is the case with nearly every one of the Mencken items (resulting I guess from him folding the things and shoving them in his pocket?) Good condition. Scarce. Nice association. $300
- It looked at first that there were dozens of copies of this work located in WorldCat/OCLC, but it turns out that of the five formats all of them are microform, and so far as I can see there are no paper holdings of the work. Obviously, there must be at least one somewhere as the microform was generated from something...and perhaps not, the original copy succumbing to the copying process. The pamphlet itself is obviously opposed to many of the decisions rendered by the PO and by the various courts and attempts to show the at-odds results of a number of different trials. The NCFFC and/or ACLU makes a good case for the lackluster decisions on the case of censorship and its ultimate attack on the right to free speech.
- Also there seems to be a pair of manuscript corrections of two misspelled words--ironically, being "purefy" and "purefying".
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