Horwitz dealt with both levels of Australia's post-war censorship system. The majority of the company's paperbacks were published locally, putting it under the jurisdiction of state censorship authorities. But Horwitz also reprinted overseas pulp paperbacks and sought access to copies of foreign titles for the purposes of study and local publication that were prohibited, bringing the publisher into direct contact with Australia's Commonwealth level censorship system that dealt with imported print material. A core challenge in researching this history is the intense secrecy with which book censorship was carried out in Australia for much of the last century, a fact which was particularly pronounced in relation to pulp and popular material. Of the nearly 16,000 publications banned by Customs between 1920 and 1973, all but around 500 titles were considered of no literary merit, and hence, their prohibition was deemed of no public interest and not reported by Customs, not even when the list of banned books was released in 1958. These publications were simply confiscated at the place of entry with no record kept. Domestically produced publications or material passed by Commonwealth Customs but deemed obscene and indecent by state authorities was seized in police raids that were seldom reported in the media. As one commentator described it in a 1964 article, the situation regarding state-based censorship of Australian publications was a rarely talked about ‘shadowy half-world of pressure groups, Chief Secretaries [a now defunct Australian state government position that oversaw senior police and coronial staff ], the Vice Squad and Gordon and Gotch, our largest magazine distributor, an often erratic interpretation of what is obscene and indecent takes place prior to due processes of the law’.

A glimpse into the extent of this activity by law enforcement in one Australian state, Victoria, is provided by the records for the Council for the Promotion of Cultural Standards (CPCS), a coalition of civic and religious groups established to ‘maintain high moral standards in the cultural life of the community, in particular, literature, art, music and amusements’.

The CPCS was established in Melbourne in October 1956 and was active until the mid-1960s.