Underground mimeograph mailings were policed through prison mail screening

Evidence

The Floating Bear was not sold but posted to a list of some 300 subscribers. Harold Carrington, Ray Bremser’s former cellmate at the Rahway State Prison in New Jersey and one of the people on the list, was incarcerated. While reading Carrington’s mail, prison authorities had been scandalized by two pieces. One, by Jones, was an account of a homosexual rape on a military base (eventually published by Grove Press in Jones’s novel The System of Dante’s Hell). The other far more scabrous piece was “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” a three-page “routine” by William Burroughs, turned down even by Kulchur as too dangerous. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 344

Categorization

• XREF: Earlier chapters on the mimeograph revolution establish The Floating Bear’s distribution model; this shows the vulnerability of that model as obscenity law enforcement tapped it.
• SHARE: Someone interested in how pre-internet publication networks were surveilled would enjoy this.