Archive of Police Citations Issued for Sale of Obscene Publications

Archive of eight citations ("procès-verbaux") from the Gendarmerie in the Seraing district of Liège, Belgium, declaring the seizure of erotic novels from bookstore owner Pierre Schoumaker, accused along with his employee Monique Orban of selling "publications obscènes."

All the reports are noted as having been issued on July 6, 1972, and following days except for one which is modified by hand to indicate January 30, 1973.

Each report consists of a printed form filled in with details about the date of the seizure; the nature of the police action ("proposition d'interdiction" and "rapport de lecture"); the names and addresses of the accused; the bibliographical details on an individual title; the names of the officers involved; and the signature of the officer filing the report. The copies offered here likely are those supplied to the accused or their lawyers.

Attached to each citation is a mimeographed "Rapport de Lecture" form: a single leaf with a typescript carbon copy recto only transcribing selected offending passages of the given book (often finishing at the end of the page with "etc., etc."). The books seized are the following:

• Béatrice Alban. Mes origines conjugales (Paris: Les Naïades)

• Harriet Daimler. Innocence ([Paris]: Marie Concorde Editeur, [1971]); the report misspells the author's first name as "Barriet."

• Serge Delroc. Marie-Jo (Editions "La Pierre Blanche," [1970])

• Arnold Kramer. Devergondages (Paris: Editions du Cratère, [1972])

• Françoise Libaud. La Chienne des loups (Editions du Livre Universel, [1970])

• Denise Miège. Littérature érotique féminine (Civilisation Moderne, [1970])

• Eric Ollivier. Les Malheurs d'Annie (Paris: La Table Ronde, [1970])

• Ooana Owen. Telle la fleur du Tamala ([Paris]: Editions du Japyx, [1970])

The offending passages are generally tedious descriptions of genitalia and male-female sexual contact, but a few describe bisexual interactions (two women and one man) or contact between two or more women. One even offers the voice of a female narrator explaining why her games of "saute-sappho" don't make her an actual lesbian.

No mention of male-male sex, although there is one passing reference to a man as an "enculé" (likely as an insult, not a literal description).

The first four titles on the list are unrepresented in WorldCat, the Catalogue Collectif de France or the catalog of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. Three are currently offered by dealers online. Conversely, no sign of Béatrice Alban's Mes origines conjugales appears in Google searches, so the excerpts in the reader's report offered here are apparently the only accessible trace of the content.

NOTE: Creasing and scattered short tears to margins; two reports with small holes from staple removal at upper left corner; black rubber-stamp impression on first leaf of one report: "PARQUET DU PROCUREUR DU ROI / 052838 24NOV72 / LIEGE."