When Jay Gertzman was growing up in his native Philadelphia, his father and uncle owned a bookstore, one that would eventually become highly controversial.
“The store was raided by the Philadelphia police in 1960,” Gertzman recalled. “The district attorney in Philadelphia inspired the raids as a show of political power. Back then, there were books that you could buy in stores that were thought to be obscene. I was just graduating from college at the time and I found the whole thing very interesting.”
Added Gertzman, now a Guttenberg resident, “The books my father and uncle were selling didn’t even have sex in the content. They just had attractive girls on the covers. The books weren’t banned, but still, the store was raided. It was at a time when there was a liberalization of the censorship laws.”
At the time, people were flocking to bookstores to purchase the controversial novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” written by D.H. Lawrence in 1928, or “Tropic of Cancer,” written by Henry Miller, simply for the novels’ explicit details about sexual encounters.
” ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was able to get published in many different languages and countries,” said Gertzman. “It was a book that was banned for 30 years, but was gradually making its way to bookstores.”
Gertzman was just finishing his undergraduate degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania and was on the way to becoming a high school English teacher in the Philadelphia school system.
“All the newspapers wrote about the banned books,” Gertzman said. “Books were getting more and more risqué. Writers were getting away with more and more things. I was very fascinated by the whole idea. It got me interested in how censorship works.”
Wrote three books about books
Since that time, Gertzman, who went on to become an English professor at Mansfield University in Mansfield, Pa., has been a collector of banned books. He has written three books: a book on the poetry of Robert Herrick, a bibliography on “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and a book on the censorship of erotic literature written in the 1920s and ’30s.
“It’s called ‘Bookleggers & Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica,’ and the University of Pennsylvania Press published it in 1999,” said Gertzman, who moved to Guttenberg three years ago. “It’s more about the way these books were published and circulated back then. People did go to jail for reading ‘Ulysses’ [by James Joyce] and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ Back then, in the 1920s, it was considered pornography.”
Added Gertzman, “Some of the Victorian books that were not widely circulated were as explicit as things you see today. They were published for the wealthy people in this country who could afford to buy them. They were pirated, because there couldn’t be a copyright on them. I always thought it was interesting to find out how banned books were circulated back then.”
Lectures all over
Since he retired as a professor at Mansfield and moved to Guttenberg to be closer to New York, Gertzman has traveled the area, giving lectures on banned books.
He recently gave a lecture at the Cresskill Public Library to discuss several different banned books and he brought his banned book collection, which is about 30 strong, for others to see.
“I try to give lectures as much as I can,” said Gertzman. “I probably do about a half dozen a year. I try to relate what was banned back then to what is considered obscene today. My collection is a selection of representative books. I don’t have any fine condition books. Those are very rare and expensive. There were some real underground stuff, like comic books, that were sold under the counter in barber shops and candy stores.”
Needless to say, Gertzman has a strong opinion about censorship. He’s not going to send Tipper Gore a greeting card anytime soon. He’s also not a big fan of Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who Gertzman calls “almost sanctimonious” with his stance towards censorship of music and rap lyrics.
“Some people say that there is no more censorship,” Gertzman said. “Maybe there isn’t in books, but it does exist in music. So there is, but there isn’t. You can find things in bigger cities that you won’t find in rural areas. Some Wal-Marts are not carrying stuff that says it has explicit language on the cover of the CDs and DVDs. Lyrics are also censored.”
Added Gertzman, “In high schools, you have books that were banned 20, 30 years ago that are still banned. I read about that every day. I think it’s still a problem. The Patriot Act requires libraries to give information to its patrons about books, but some books are ignored. The FBI has contacted libraries about material.”
Gertzman said that a bookstore in Denver was recently raided because of the books they had in the store.
“It bothers me that it still happens in high schools and colleges,” Gertzman said. “It’s not so much in books and magazines anymore, but it is prevalent in lyrics and music played on college campus radio stations.”
Some is necessary
While Gertzman is not pleased with censorship about sexually explicit material, he does understand that some sense of censorship is necessary.
“When it deals with military security and there is information that needs to be kept secret, then I understand, because it has to do with the county’s safety,” Gertzman said. “But when we simply listen to someone who says that this is bad and we believe them, then it’s killing the message or ignoring the message.”
Gertzman said that he has more of a chance to fight for the cause in the area.
“I love living so close to New York,” Gertzman said. “With the movies, the museums, the plays, the book stores. It’s a wonderful place.”