Selling Sex

Grand Fancy Catalogue of the Sporting Man’s Bazaar. [United States, 1870].

Private Catalogue of Fancy Works. [New York?, ca. 1880].

After the War pornographers continued to use the mails to distribute their products. Based in urban areas, they nonetheless were able to reach customers across the country. The Grand Fancy Catalogue encouraged the patronage of “gentlemen living at a far distance from us,” and carried diverse stock, including transparent playing cards, figures with moving parts simulating “the act,” and novelty sleeve buttons engraved with lewd mottoes. A hand-written note at the top reads, “Hand one of these to Some Friend.”

The Comstock Act of 1873 did little to curb obscene literature. It merely pushed the business further underground, encouraging publishers to adopt more strategies of subterfuge. Sellers continued to do robust business with countrymen, evidenced by this advertising packet addressed to George Hinds, a farmer in Eden Mills, Vermont. The flyer – completely separate from a card containing the bookseller’s name and address – requests that customers refer to the works by number only, “in case the letters get opened by accident or design.” Postage-paid items were disguised as letters, “thereby rendering detection impossible.” The seller has also included a mildly suggestive card as a sample.