22                                J. D. S. Armstrong

John Sumner had brought the complaint against Simon &
Schuster and was thus their nominal adversary in these preliminary
stages of what was, after all, a criminal proceeding. Sumner had
succeeded Anthony Comstock as Secretary of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice, and in that capacity he made a
busy career out of tracking down obscene materials and seeking
their criminal prosecution. Nor was this precisely thankless work:
by a curious arrangement, the Society received a portion of each
fine levied in the successful prosecutions it instigated. Moreover, a
special act ofthe New York State Legislature had bestowed special
police rights of search, seizure, and arrest on the Society's agents.
Mr. Sumner's, therefore, was no backyard operation, but a
powerful and persistent threat to publishers and booksellers.

Thomas Seltzer had published the 1922 edition of Casanova's
Homecoming that had initially drawn down the ire of Sumner and
his Society. A complaint was lodged in Magistrate's Court (the
same procedure employed in the case against Simon & Schuster)
alleging the obscenity of Casanova's Homecoming and of D. H.
Lawrence's Women in Love, also published by Seltzer. The edition
complained of had been produced for subscribers in a limited
edition of 1,250.

On September 30, 1922, New York City Magistrate George W.
Simpson issued his opinion that Casanova was not obscene, and
publication resumed. Larger printings came out later in 1922 and in
1923; the copy in Columbia's general collection was bought from
this latter printing.

But the Society was determined to continue its action against this
particular book, and sought indictment of Seltzer by a grand jury.
The grand jury duly indicted, and Seltzer's attorneys moved to
block further proceedings by appealing to the Supreme Court ofthe
State of New York, Special Term (a court of lowly jurisdiction, but
not as lowly as a magistrate's court). In January 1924, in People v.
Seltzer, Judge (later Senator) Robert Wagner announced in a
remarkably chauvinistic and paternalistic opinion that he could not
rule as a matter of law that Casanova was not obscene; both the state