The Press: Get a Load of This!

The professional vice-hunters, quiescent for a time, were out in full cry. John S. Sumner, who as executive secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice has probably read more dirty books, looked at more obscene postcards, and watched more burlesque shows than any man in the U.S., last week got the law on Book Critic Edmund Wilson's best-selling (50,000 copies), clinically sexy Memoirs of Hecate County (TIME, March 25).

Cops, armed with warrants, picked up 130 copies in Manhattan bookshops as "salacious and lascivious literature," summoned Hecate's publishers, Doubleday, Doran, to court.

Manhattan's gum-chewing, lip-smacking Daily News had the last word. Said the News: "Memoirs is [Edmund Wilson's] first score on the best-seller list, and the only reason it was there for several weeks is because word got around that oh, boy, you ought to get a load of this!

"The book is tough reading. Everybody keeps talking all the time, and not about anything that seems to matter much except in certain circles of well-to-do suburbia. . . .

"We don't think Wilson has done anything for literature and we don't think Sumner is doing anything for public morals. However, he has done something pretty big for Doubleday and Wilson."