On 10th April 1984, HM Customs raided Gay’s the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury. Without warning, or even much of a plan, officers ordered the shop to close and began to ransack the shelves, stacking books in piles on the floor. Over the next six months, they seized over 140 titles – around 2,000 individual books, or one third of the shop’s stock. Nine of Gay's the Word’s staff and directors were charged with conspiracy to import so-called ‘indecent or obscene’ material.
Seized Books!, published by Senate House Library, offers a short introduction to Gay’s the Word’s defence of their shop and staff, and presents information about each of the seized titles. It has been thoughtfully researched and written by Sarah Pyke and Leila Kassir, with a galvanising afterword by Michael Bronski. It was an honour to produce illustrations for this book, and to work with PageMasters who designed and printed it.
