Ralph Daigh, editorial director of Fewcett publications: "We have satisfied a great hunger for reading...adding materially to education." (He also asserted the public likes to read about sex, anyway, and that works published by his concern were no more indecent than various episodes in Plato and Shakespeare.)

The committee estimates the number of pocket-sized paper covers put on the market in the last two years at nearly 500,000,000 copies. Magazines are listed at 1231 different titles; comic books at some 450 to 500, and estimates of their total circulation for the past two years runs into the near-billions.

Solutions of Sorts

That enforcement of existing obscenity laws is impracticable against such publications in the Boston area, except in isolated cases, has already been demonstrated.

Getting at the problem in a different way, Dwight S. Strong, executive director of the revamped Watch and Ward society, has gone on record as feeling that publishers should indeed set and maintain their own standards of decency, providing these are decent enough.

In fact, Strong's outspoken criticism of a Massachusetts censorship bill at a fairly recent House hearing, inspired the sponsoring legislator to ask curiously, "You are from the Watch and Ward, aren't you?"

Several comic book publishers have in past years adopted the socalled "Comic Book Code," which provides that their juvenile publications will not overemphasize sex, crime, exhibit racial or religious prejudice, or portray American institutions in a harmful manner. They are, needless to say, the few among the many.

Unfortunately, when considered as a total program concerning not only comics, but illustrated magazines and cheap reprints, the attempt to instill into publishers a sense of their own responsibility seems perhaps to be a naive hope.

The liberal has another answer; a "positive" attitude toward the problem must be created. Here, for example are the comments of Emory Stevens Bucke, editor of Zion's Herald, a Methodist publication.

"Certainly we have a problem," says Bucke.

Question of Alternatives

"But by condeming censorship, are we going to get anywhere," Bucke continued. "The whole question is one of alternatives; we have to create a climate of opinion that can handle such material in stride, and go on to something better."

Evidently, some method for damming up this flood of cheap literature must be established--a method which can avoid the dangers implicit in covert censorship.

Massachusetts already has a system--an effective but ill-defined system. And beyond the evils inherent in any censorial set-up, the one in the Commonwealth presents the further evil of uncertain boundaries. The limits of the system are almost impossible to define partially because the system is largely a secret one, and partially because a host of small pressure groups and private individuals wander around the field.

Dangerous Possibilities