ART UNION TICKETS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22609, 28 June 1935, Page 3

ART UNION TICKETS

NECESSITY FOR IMPRINT CASE AGAINST TRADESMAN. FAILS. A decision of more than usual interest to printers was delivered in the City Police Court yesterday by Mr H. W. Bundle, S.M., following the hearing of a charge againßt David Miller Lister, who pleaded not guilty to having omitted to print his name and address in a book of which he was the printer. The information arose out of a prosecution brought last week against a woman for conducting an illegal art union, the defendant having, been the printer of the tickets for the raffle. Senior Sergeant Packer said it was clear that the raffle for which the tickets were issued was illegal, and the defendant should first have demanded from the woman who organised it her permit from the Minister of Internal Affairs, and also a permit from the institution on behalf of which it was being conducted. Under the Act it was quite clear that the books of tickets should have borne the name and address of the printer on the first and last leaves. The tickets could not be characterised as receipts nor circulars, as there was nothing to show that the persons who had paid money had received anything but a chance in an illegal lottery. Moreover, unless the woman had chosen to te\l the police who the printer was they would never have found out. Mr M. Joel, who appeared for the defendant, said that the case was of some interest to printers, who wanted to know where they stood. It was clear that the defendant had nothing to do with the conduct of the lottery; his duty, according to the prosecution, merely lay in putting his name and address on the tickets, as he should do in the case of anything else he printed. The Act under which the prosecution was brought was originally designed to prevent the publication or dispersion of libellous, seditious, or indecent matter, and counsel submitted that the words " book or paper " meant reading matter only. The Act required that the name and address of the printer should be printed on the fronts of the first and the backs of the last tickets in the ■books, and therefore, in the present case, none of the intervening tickets in the books would bear any imprint whatever. Assuming that the tickets came under the exemption clause of the Act, which provided exemption in the case of receipts for money or goods, then counsel submitted that the tickets were receipts—this was the only way in which they could be treated. There was a good deal of confusion among printers as to their duties in these matters, as it was frequently noticed that many books were imprinted on the front page but not on the back, and vice versa.

The magistrate said he was unable to see that a number of tickets bound together constituted a hook. It would, in fact, be an absurdity so to hold. As counsel had pointed out, the intervening tickets between first and last tickets in each bundle did not carry nn imprint, nor was it necessary that they should do so. He did not think that the tickets constituted the kind of book contemplated by the Act, and under the Act exemption was clear, in that it applied to any receipt for money or goods. The tickets were nothing more nor less than receipts for an illegal art union, and in the circumstances the defendant was entitled to have the charge dismissed.