<P> Critics praised and censured the publication . Poet Allen Ginsberg said that it will "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years ." </P> <P> The rights for the British edition were acquired by Marion Boyars and John Calder and the novel ended up in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions . The manuscript was published in January 1966, received positive reviews and sold almost 14,000 copies . The director of Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford complained to the DPP about the detailed depictions of brutality and cruelty in the book but the DPP did not pursue the allegations . </P> <P> Sir Cyril Black, the then Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, initiated a private prosecution of the novel before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court, under judge Leo Gradwell . The public prosecutor brought an action under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act . During the hearing the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate ordered that all copies of the book within the Magistrate's Court be seized . Not a single bookseller possessed a copy, but the publishing offices of Calder and Boyars, within the Bow Street Magistrate's jurisdiction, were discovered to be in possession of three copies . The books were duly seized, and Mrs. Boyars was summonsed to show cause why "the said articles" should not be forfeited . Expert witnesses spoke, "unprecedentedly," for the prosecution: they included the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell . On the defense side were the scholars Al Alvarez II, and professor Frank Kermode, who had previously compared the work to Dickens . Others who provided rebuttal evidence included H. Montgomery Hyde . </P> <P> The order had no effect beyond the borders of the Marlborough Street Court--the London neighborhood of Soho . At the hearing Calder declared that the book would continue to be published and would be sold everywhere else outside of that jurisdiction . In response the prosecutor brought criminal charges under Section 2 of the Act, which entitled the defendants to trial by jury under Section 4 . </P>

Last exit to brooklyn by hubert selby junior