Thousands of ‘indecent’ and ‘obscene’ books once banned by State to go on public view

What connects F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Mitford, Edna O’Brien, John Updike and Iris Murdoch? It’s not just that they were famous writers. They were all authors of books historically banned by the State on the grounds that they contained material that was either deemed “indecent” or “obscene” or both.

“That usually meant anything to do with sex and sexuality,” says Brian Hughes, a lecturer in the department of history at University of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College.

Over the decades, copies of some 12,000 banned books were accumulated by the Censorship of Publications Board, which was established in 1930. They were kept in a room in the Department of Justice and were not publicly accessible. Most members of the public would have had no idea this collection even existed. Later this year, the books will be moved to the National Archives and, in due course, will be made accessible to the public.

Over time, the little-seen collection, which fills an entire room in the department’s building on St Stephen’s Green, has become more than a record of what the State decided their citizens should not read. It is also a social history capsule of publishing, design, readers’ tastes and wider society.

Along with the editions of what are now considered modern classics, such as Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, are shelves of cheap popular fiction paperbacks of the day, most of them British and US publications. A Doctor and his Mistress. Never Cheat Alone. Pushover, the Torrid Tale of a Wicked Town. Random Mating. Portrait of Passion. The lurid covers routinely depict fully dressed men, half-naked women, guns, knives, office interiors and dark city streets.

Then there are those books that simply look comedic, with exclamation marks all over the cover. One such is Dead as a Dinosaur, the cover of which says “Murder in the Museum!” A startled woman stands over a dead man on the floor, a dinosaur skeleton in the background. One can only imagine what the censors found offensive here.

As Brian Hughes notes, the definition of indecent or obscene also covered social topics in fiction and non-fiction such as “divorce proceedings, violent crimes and adultery”.

There are many non-fiction titles in the banned books collection. One is Monkey on My Back by Wendell Brown (1953), which is a series of interviews with “junkies” and “young dope addicts” in Detroit. “Told by a man who lived with them intimately and who spares no one in exposing the menace of teenage drug addiction.”

Lonely Women by Gerda Rhoads (1957), which has a novelistic-like cover depicting a woman in a red dress lying on a couch while a man with a gun stands behind her, is in fact a non-fiction book about women who have jobs. “The harsh, vicious world of frustrated career girls in America,” reads the cover copy. The back cover carries an extract from the distinguished Times Literary Supplement: “A clearly truthful account of the lives and jungle-fights of cold-hearted career women.”

There is also an entire section of the room given over to books on topics of sex. Female Homosexuality. The Lesbian in our Society. Sexual Life in England Past and Present.

The Censorship of Publications Board’s last meeting to ban a book was as recent as 2016. Now that virtually all adults in Ireland have access to the internet, the State’s role in censorship of written material has become obsolete.