Julius Reiter

Julius Reiter owned the "Gaywood" publishing firm.

http://www.jottings.ca/john/kelly/biobib.html In January 1954, Reg Carter and Julius Reiter are found guilty at the Old Bailey of publishing seven obscene Hank Janson novels, fined a thousand pounds each, and obliged to serve six months in jail. It is a peak year in the war against sex-and-violence, the number of successful prosecutions doubling, the fines quintupling.

http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/content/118/3/653.full.htmlCarter was one of Hank Janson's several publishers. The trial in Blackburn in 1952 had involved another publisher of Janson's books; in 1954, Carter and his business partner Julius Reiter faced an obscenity trial of their own, and went to prison. Reiter had repeatedly shown manuscripts to detectives, hoping to get a definitive answer on whether or not a work was obscene, but they always refused to give assurances. Carter now wrote to the director of public prosecutions about the Lolita decision: “If this report is factual, please advise us by return of the kindly official concerned in order that we, as publishers, may submit manuscripts for similar vetting.”

http://thecrimefactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/CFIssue005.pdf In 1947, Gaywood Distributors was founded by Julius Reiter, a German who opposed the Nazi’s and left Germany for England in 1933. During the war he was interned on the Isle of Wight and then in Canada, but returned to England after the war. In 1948 he began to distribute the Hank Janson books written by Stephen Frances and in 1951 to publish Janson books under his New Fiction Press Imprint with Reg Carter. The most notorious police and court action however was the Hank Janson trial. In 1954 four of the first seven Hank Janson books were cited at the Old Bailey in a trial as “obscene libels” and the books were subject to destruction orders. The books published in 1952 by New Fiction Press and distributed by Gaywood Press, Ltd., included seven titles: Accused, Auctioned, Killer, Persian Pride, Amok, Vengeance and Pursuit. Advertised but never to appear were three others; Woman Trap, Perfumed Nemesis and Blond Dupe. All books featured sexy women in cover art by Heade. The results of the trial were that certain of the Hank Janson books were censored and banned in the UK. Covers were censored by being overprinted with silver paint to cover Heade’s sexy female images; later books used only the Janson logo as the cover “art” and no other art at all. Heade’s work – some of his best Hank Janson cover art – was never used on some of the books. Worse yet, the publishers of the Janson books, Julius Reiter of Gaywood Press and Reg Carter of New Fiction Press, were imprisoned! They received 6 months in Brixton Prison and each was fined 2,000 pounds! Meanwhile, Heade seemed to have gone underground and to have disappeared completely. No more books appeared with his sexy art and his distinctive bold signature. Heade did continue to do paperback cover art, for Pan and Panther Books for instance, however it was under his new pseudonym signed as “Cy Webb” and it was much more circumspect. He also did some covers for the Sexton Blake series. In 1955, when Reg Carter revived New Fiction Press he continued publishing Hank Janson books and Heade began doing Hank Janson covers again. However Heade’s covers did not have the quality and passion evident in his earlier art and all were now unsigned. The court case seems to have made Heade more careful. Heade died in 1957 and with him the art that was the spirit behind Hank Janson and the UK gangster digest boom. Prison for Reiter and Carter must have sent a real chill into the men who published gangster books; so that many publishers moved on to do science fiction and westerns - genres which were just as popular and a hell of a lot safer!

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