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2 | I n t roduc t ion
a throng of people there obscene pictures of nude females.” When Comstock and two police officers went to find Brown, they discovered him drunk in Schmitt’s saloon. Upon being apprehended, Brown warned Comstock and the officers that he had wired his studio to electrocute any attempted interlopers. Undoubtedly skeptical of Brown’s drunken boast, the three men carried him back to his house, where they unfortunately discovered that he had not lied. When a detective opened the door to the “laboratory,” he received a shock from a “current of electricity.” Inside the secretive lair, Brown was found to have “all the latest appliances,” including “instruments used by microscopists,” and plates and photographs “from life, and several were evidently taken by a flash light, instantaneous process worked with an electrical or clock-work appliance, for the subject of them was Brown himself with a nude or partly nude female on his knee. Some of the women had modesty enough that they hid their faces with their hands or arms, and others turned their faces away from the camera.” When Comstock grilled Brown as to the subjects of the pictures, he backed off his claim that they were respectable local women and instead insisted that they were “naturally women of loose morals; the majority of them women who have passed beyond the pale of society.”2 The case ended on a dramatic note when Brown forfeited his $1,000 bail and ran away to Canada, where he died of unknown causes the following year, “off among strangers.”3 The evidence we have today of what actually happened in Brooklyn Heights is scant, but the episode nevertheless is illuminating about the state of production, distribution, and suppression of photographs of nudes at the height of Anthony Comstock’s career as a professional censor. First, we may note that Brown’s paranoia about the possibility of arrest was extreme but not unwarranted. By 1888, New Yorkers were well aware that the penalties for breaking obscenity laws were harsh. They also knew Anthony Comstock’s name and the address of the NYSSV, where they could report items they found offensive, such as Brown’s photographs. Witness fees, set at a percentage of the penalties assessed, served as incentive for individuals to come forward.