The Bookseller and the Law

Judge James H. Sisk, of Cambridge, who tried the proprietor of the Dunster House Bookshop for selling an "indecent" book and imposed a jail sentence of thirty days and a fine of $500 has remitted the prison sentence. This was the famous case in which the prosecuting attorney and the judge united to condemn the dishonest and provocative methods by which the Watch and Ward Society procured its evidence. The highest court of the state had just affirmed, as a matter of law, the verdict; but the trial judge will find Cambridge opinion, as well as that of other cities and states, with him in his final action.

For the public has a right instinct to judge lightly the bookseller who occasionally sells a book which oversteps the legal line of obscenity. It condemns the professional who publishes a book simply because it stands on the border line of decency, and exploits every possible titillation of his product. But the companies which subterraneously produce smut and near-smut, as a regular business, stand on a very different footing from the reputable bookseller who incidentally procures for a client a copy of a book for which he asks. It was because of this evident difference that Assemblyman Langdon Post last year introduced into the New York State Legislature a bill absolving booksellers from prosecution if they would divulge the source of the illicit product; and while Mr. Post's bill may have had flaws of detail, the proposal is sure, and properly so, in one form or another, to come up again. --New York Herald Tribune.