U.S. Supreme Court Next to Sit on 'Fanny'

Fanny's made the big time.

The United States Supreme Court decided yesterday to review the Massachusetts ban on John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the tale of an 18th century London prostitute.

G. P. Putnam's Sons, Fanny's New York publisher, appealed the April decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts that Fanny Hill is "obscene, impure, and indecent."

In Fanny's original trial, John M. Bullitt '43, professor of English, testified in Suffolk Superior Court that the book is of literary and historic merit. Bullitt was one of a series of professors brought into court in May, 1964 by Putnam's expert censorship lawyers. Charles I. Rembar '35 and Reuben Goodman '35.

The Court grouped Fanny with the cases of Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of Eros magazine, and a New Yorker arrested for having sadistic literature in his basement. The review could result in a total redefinition of Federal obscenity standards.

Meanwhile, in New Bedford, the Massachusetts courts began their suppression of yet another book. A bookseller was fined $1000 and sent to jail for a year for selling Henry Miller's Sexus.