On with the show! . Anything to Declare? . Jackie Foster . Camp outside the gates . Gluck-mania!

Anything to Declare?

Among donations to the archive this summer was a much-thumbed and apparently pirated paperback copy of Radclyffe Hall's pioneering lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.

In 1928, after a campaign by the Sunday Express and the Daily Express to have the book suppressed, Hall's publisher Jonathan Cape voluntarily withdrew the book and flew papier-mâché moulds of the plates to Paris, where John Holroyd-Reece's Pegasus Press subleased the publishing rights.

The widespread publicity given to the book's British prosecution for obscenity gave The Well of Loneliness a fame which it might never have enjoyed otherwise. The book was sold from barrows to British travellers at the Gare du Nord in Paris and, although the Pegasus Press was reprinting each month, it could not keep up with the demand for copies from print-starved inverts, curious general readers and, one supposes, voyeurs looking for a dirty read.

Smuggling

The Home Secretary of the day ordered that any copies found in the baggage of passengers returning from France should be seized. The Pegasus Press edition of The Well which the archive already houses is a large and heavy hardback but the newly-donated copy is a light and flexible paperback; perfect for concealing about the person while innocent baggage was searched. An elderly informant remembers smuggling two copies back from Paris, one in each of the balloon sleeves fashionable that year.