Flood of Trash

Britain's paper-hungry publishers had few magazines of their own to sell. Raising a hue & cry about "cultural invasion" by U.S. magazines, they had persuaded the Government to limit U.S. imports. Now they had invasion jitters over a new menace: they had kept out the good only to be inundated by the bad.

To piece out Britons' starvation diet of reading matter, the Board of Trade had agreed to let in magazines from within the Empire. Through that breach in the cultural ramparts, a trashy flood poured in from Canada. Bookstalls unloaded over 6,000,000 comics, westerns, detectives and sex pulps. The comics, full of rocket men and bosomy girls, were the biggest surprise of all; British children's comics are mainly animal or flower stories. London street hawkers took in up to -L-15 a day. Customers paid up to 25. 6d. (50-c-) for such gems as Vivid Confessions and How to Write Intimate Love Letters. Outraged British publishers couldn't prove it, but they felt sure that some of this Canadian flood came from U.S. firms anxious to dump their recent heavy returns.

Last week the flood was subsiding. A new Board of Trade ruling required the invaders to take out import licenses. The market had once more been made safe for the British publishers, even if they couldn't supply it.

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