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By the end of the nineteenth century there was a flourishing cross-border trade in pornographic books in Western Europe. The production center was Paris, where the law of 29 July 1881 guaranteed considerable freedom of the press and where the book, in particular, benefitted from special cultural protections under the country's obscenity law of 2 August 1882. Producers of pornographic books, however, could still be criminally prosecuted in the country's highest court on the grounds of immorality. As a consequence they carefully concealed their identities and publishing activities. One of the most visible of these publishers was Charles Carrington (1867–1921), an Englishman who in 1895 relocated to Paris, where he ran a bookshop and published roughly 300 different titles in English and French.1 He published some of his books under an open imprint bearing his name (in fact his pseudonym, for he was born Paul Ferdinando), while others he published clandestinely, outside legal deposit. We know much about Carrington's Anglo-French operations, even from his own pen, but there is little known about other producers active at the same time in overlapping roles as publishers, printers, and booksellers. Bibliographers specializing in clandestine pornography have done the most to reconstruct the lives, careers, and book lists of these other pornographers, but as Peter Mendes admits, "terms like 'probable', 'possible', 'likely', 'conjecture', and 'surmise'" [have] figure[d] extensively."2 Most of those responsible for putting pornographic writing in circulation in the period have thus remained obscure, limiting our understanding of the types of individuals and social networks that made up this subculture.
The difficulty in unmasking clandestine publishers who were operating out of Paris between the 1880s and 1920s has been threefold. First of all, traditional publishers' archives do not exist. Secondly, the names of publishers that have been passed down in bibliographic sources are often incomplete. Digging through French physical archives for a surname (which also might be a pseudonym or some corruption of the original) necessitates much labor, time, and patience, as indexing is minimal and access is limited. Finally, even if such sources were abundant, physical archives are typically bound by geographical borders, so that the paper trail ends when publishers moved (which they did for job opportunities and to flee the authorities). As...