By Janalyn Martinez, Cataloger
Printing Mock-ups for Book Design Cover. The Grolier Club of New York, \*56.3\S616\1846.
The Grolier Club recently acquired book cover mock-ups for a novel titled "Adventures of a Young Woman." The mockups show two proofs of the same design, printed from the same plate with different colorations, along with a third, similar design. No author is listed in the cover design but the publisher is identified as Sinclair & Bagley. The author's name wasn't strictly necessary for our record (I was not cataloging the actual book), but curiosity inspired me to investigate, sending me down a rabbit hole into the world of illicit pornography in Victorian New York.
I started where book searches usually start: a title search in WorldCat, which turned up no records of a novel with this title but did lead me to two other works published by Sinclair & Bagley, the publisher listed on the mock-ups. But those works – a monthly catalog of erotic literature (1845-) and a short novel titled "The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin: Narrative of Fact" (1846), both in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society – hinted at an unseemly venture.
The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin. Narrative of Fact. New York: Sinclair & Bagley, 1846. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Bagley's Monthly Newsletter no. 5 (January 15, 1846) page 2, announcing the recent publication of Cicily Martin. Image courtesy of the American Aintquarian Society.
Further research led me to Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York, which identified Sinclair & Bagley as a false imprint,* likely created by "a legendary publisher of bawdy books named William Haines" (Dennis p. 5). E. Haven Hawley's dissertation, American Publishers of Indecent Books, 1840-1890, also discusses the elusive Haines.
Despite such prolificacy, no books bearing his imprint appear to have survived (Hawley, American Publishers p. 421-422). Instead, scholars must rely on the evidence from criminal court cases: he was arrested three times, and convicted once, before he learned the value of assuming an alias ("Piggot"), bribing law enforcement, and taking a more hands-off approach to production and distribution (Dennis p. 146-148; Haven, American Publishers p. 421). It is the last strategy that perhaps inspired the use of the imprint "Sinclair & Bagley."1 In 1853 one of Haines' associates, the printer John McLoughlin, admitted printing erotic books for Haines using false imprints; one book was The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin, allegedly published by Sinclair & Bagley in 1846 (Dennis p. 149). However, there are no records of a firm by that name and despite the contemporary evidence suggests the novel was actually published in the 1850s.2 This book, the sole remaining copy of which is in the American Antiquarian Society's archives, may very well be the only surviving Haines publication (Dennis p. 148-149). 3
Despite McLoughlin's cooperation with law enforcement, Haines faced no real consequences for his continued involvement in this trade, thanks to both his extensive bribery of officials (estimated in 1871 as amounting to more than $20,000) and the care with which he took to distance himself from all aspects of the production, publication, and sale of illegal books (Dennis p. 152). Even Anthony Comstock, who devoted his life to putting an end to the illegal book trade in New York, was unable to bring about criminal charges against Haines; the best he could do was buy up much of Haines' equipment and stock shortly after his death in 1872 (of course, Comstock claimed Haines' death was the result of learning he was being investigated by the crusader) (Dennis p. 243). Comstock did, however, go after every associate of Haines he could find.
Is Adventures of a Young Woman a Haines publication? Without the actual text it is impossible to determine if it is even erotica, let alone something produced by Haines rather than any one of a dozen other pornographers at the time. The use of the Sinclair & Bagley imprint is a tantalizing clue; the design of the binding mock-ups might be another. Dr. E. Haven Hawley, the associate university librarian for Cornell Library's special collections and an expert in the 19th century publication of pornography in America (and owner of a 20th century reprint of Cicily Martin), graciously agreed to consult with us and to look over images of the binding mock-ups. In her opinion, they bear a similarity to the designs Haines used in the title pages and illustrations for several publications.
Scholars have identified at least two of the binders Haines used, John Ulm and a man named Riehl (Hawley, American Publishers p. 424; Dennis p. 245-246), but I could not find descriptions or exemplars of their work. If they weren't seized and destroyed by Comstock, the stereotyped plates Haines might have used for Adventures may have ended up in the hands of another publisher after his death (Hawley, The Women p. 5-6).
Perhaps someday a copy of this novel will turn up in a dusty bookstore or a trunk in an attic, or the plates Haines used will be discovered in an old print shop. Until then, we have the elegant binding mock-ups for an ephemeral work to admire.
References:
Dennis, Donna. Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Hawley, Elizabeth Haven. American Publishers of Indecent Books, 1840-1890 (Doctoral dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, December 2005).
Hawley, Elizabeth Haven. The Women Behind Pornography in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, June 2005.
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