BANNED MAGAZINES

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 10

BANNED MAGAZINES

American “Pulp” Papers . Proscribed CUSTOMS TAKE ACTION Dominion Special Service. Christchurch March 11.

Fifteen American magazines which are considered objectionable have been banned from New Zealand recently by the Customs Department. A longer list of proscribed publications, just issued to a city bookseller by a wholesale house, was shown yesterday to Mr.’ C.'O. Trownson, Collector of Customs at Christchurch. Out of 29 listed he confirmed 15, mainly of the “pulp” kind, as having been recently banned. The wholesalers’ note to the bookseller is worded as follows: “Will agents note the following list of American magazines which are definitely banned by the New Zealand' Customs authorities. Agents exhibiting these for sale will be liable for prosecution under the Indecent Publications Act. . . There follows the list of 29 magazines. This is by no means a complete list of those magazines which in one degree or another are held to be objectionable. There are a number which are under suspicion by the Customs Department, and which are accordingly scrutinised copy by copy. In several cases single issues have been banned. Other magazines the department allows to enter the country, but they are sold at the risk of prosecution. To mention the names of such magazines would be to increase their circulation in certain directions. Booksellers have notified, that there has been a growing inclination of schoolboys and young men toward publications like those which have been banned. One bookseller said yesterday that she hgd become so concerned at the number of schoolboys buying objectionable magazines that she had given up stocking those which she considered most harmful. However, she said that since the publicity given in the newspapers to the bad effects, of “pulps,” there had been some decline in their circulation. Last month the New Zealand Library Association conference discussed the matter and set up a committee to consider it. The committee’s report, which was adopted, recommended that the Minister of Customs should be approached with a request for action to exclude magazines of a degraded moral tone. “LESS SAID THE • BETTER” Question For Magistrate To Decide “I think the less said about it the better,” said a head office Customs official interviewed at Wellington yesterday regarding the importation of “pulp” magazines into New Zealand. He pointed out that only actually indecent publications could be stopped by the Customs; the question of perverted or depraved taste for crime or sensation was outside the power of the department. It. was for a magistrate to decide whether many such magazines were fit to be sold on the bookstalls of the country or if they came within the scope of the Indecent Publications Act. Actually, in the case of a very big proportion of the trashy and sensational “pulp” magazines, it appeared that there was no power to stop their being imported into, or sold, in New Zealand, as they were not actually indecent, however deleterious they might be to adolescent or child readers.