Archive of Our Own ^beta

Notes:

Thomas Alan Arthur was sentenced to 40 years in prison over FICTIONAL “obscene” written stories.

Believe it or not, this did NOT occur in the 1950s or in some repressive backwards dictatorship. This happened three short years ago, in 2021.

In the United States of America. Land of the fucking free, where Freedom of Speech reigns.

When I first began researching this case, I expected it to be a bit unfair. But I was NOT prepared for the shocking truth behind it.

Press releases from the US government painted Arthur’s website, “Mr. Double”, as being dedicated to the most depraved subject matter imaginable: “the rape, torture and murder of infants and toddlers.”

And no one seems to have bothered to research if this was actually true at all.

Well, it’s not. Surprise: the government lied to us again (how does everyone keep falling for this shit?)

The truth is that site actually hosted a variety of erotica and transgressive literature, on many subject matters. Everything was behind a paywall, so there was NO chance for anyone accidentally being exposed to it.

The most alarming thing to me was that the bulk of the content on the site was actually over 13,000 rare, antique, erotic books of immense historical value.

The site contained a vast number of long-forgotten, out-of-print paperbacks from the 1950s, published by small presses. It had underground pamphlets that secretly circulated in Victorian London. It had unique works printed by Olympia Press - that is the same company who published the works of geniuses like Burroughs and Nabokov! There are countless works by Greenleaf Classics, who were instrumental in fighting US censorship in court - they fought all the way to the Supreme Court in order to establish YOUR modern rights to freedom of expression.

And guess what? A large number of these books remain so rare, that 50+ years later, they are STILL not available ANYWHERE else in digitized form.

Let me ask: is THIS the literature that our benevolent government is so afraid of?

Is THIS the repulsive smut whose mere existence was deemed so dangerous to all of society, that an old man had to be condemned to a slow death behind prison walls?

But then again, why should you believe me? I mean, I could just be making all of this up.

Well…

For starters, I happen to have access to all the stories that were ever posted on Mr. Double.

So I am posting a meticulous table of contents of the over 12,000 eNovels that were hosted on Mr. Double. The list is so long it had to be split into three different chapters.

Go ahead pick a book from the list below.

Seriously.

Any book at all.

Then look it up online and you’ll see that I’m telling you the truth.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)