This network graph illustrates connections between individuals documented in Advertising Pornography and Obscenity Trials and connections already established in scholarship on the nineteenth and early twentieth-century European pornography trade. One of the pleasures of working on this history is seeing parts of an often clandestine trade’s social infrastructure come into focus through the research process — and establishing some connections, like shared addresses or that people were tried together, tends to set the stage for research that reveals more detail about the nature of the business in a given time and place.

I’ve been enjoying updating this while I’ve been working on Obscenity Trials this week — I should probably make a dedicated page for it, as I’d like to keep adding to and refining it. If you use it, please keep in mind that it’s very much an in-progress thing as the project many of the connections rest on is still evolving. Two or three people in the network might well turn out to be one person! Figuring out the identities of people who often used aliases in their work is tricky. If you have suggestions for additions, feel free to get in touch. You can also download the data and code for this visualization here.