Wednesday, 5 May 1955. The Court resumed at 2 p.m. JOHN WALLACE METCALFE, sworn and examined: BY MR WANSTALL: Your name is John Wallace Metcalfe? A: Yes. Q: And you live at 58 Hardy Street, Dover Heights, Sydney in the State of New South Wales? A: Yes. Q: You are the deponent in an affidavit which is before the court in these matters? A: Yes. Q: As a librarian do you have to control the availability of certain types of literature in the sense of the public access to them? A: Yes. Q: According to what classifications do you control their general availability in your libraries? A: In making my judgment - I take it that is what you mean - on what should be restricted in access and what should not, I find it necessary to have three categories in mind. There is the book we assume to be intensely pornographic and the book which has a genuine scientific attitude towards such matters as sex but which may be used as though it were pornography - case histories and the like. Then there is, well, the rest. There are special categories such as books dealing with forgery and embezzlement and what not. There is the book, then, that we find may be subject to some abuse. For example, works of art may be subject to mutilation and so on but whereas we may protect those for purely physical reasons in their distribution, we find we cannot limit public access to them because we find there is no limit to the kind of mental use which can be made of them by minds which appear to be already perverted in some way. Q: Does it fall to your lot, then, to exercise the judgment necessary to control their use in the way you have described? A: Yes. We segregate books in different categories. People make application for certain categories on printed forms and either myself or a senior officer would check, as it were, all requests for that type of material. BY THE CHIEF JUSTICE: Those categories that you have referred to are all categories which are restricted in their access? A: The third category no, is not. The third category is the general category of books which are on open access, as we call it. They are on the open shelves of the library in the reading room or they can be obtained by anyone from 202
The 1955 Romance Comics Trial
