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To understand these tactics, we need to go back to the reasons why the 1902 law had failed. The main one relates to a major theme of this book, namely, the relation between space and piracy. The law inherited a belief associating morality and place that had been ingrained in British society for centuries. This was the conviction that the home was the primary site of sound morals. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when vagrancy acts were first instituted, it had been taken for granted that secure, patriarchal households were the basis of a stable society. Streets, fairs, and markets, on the contrary, were notorious for their licentiousness. When piracy was invented in the late seventeenth century, it was at first associated with printing carried on in "holes" and "corners," rather than in homes. Laws requiring peddlers to obtain licenses, which the publishers had already sought to exploit against sellers of piracies, were another reflection of this idea, the tenacity ofwhich it would be hard to overestimate. Aprincipal reason why the 1902 act provided no right of forced entry into houses, then, was that it assumed apriori that piracywas a street-based crime.

The consequence became immediately visible in one of Preston's first cases, in Liverpool in late 1902. In this industrial city some two hundred separate songs were reputedly available as piracies, and the legitimate trade complained of a 6o percent decline in business. So Preston arrived and immediately moved to seize piracies from "street sellers." Then he and three detectives armed themselves with court authority and raided the home of oneJohn O'Neile at 5o Hunter Street, seizing seven thousand copies of pirated music and causing a "sensation" in the neighborhood. They had found the top floor of the building "literally covered with music," they told the subsequent hearing; even more stacks of copies were under a bed in another room. The defense, however, contended that there was no evidence that the music had actually been sold there - something that Preston's attorney had to concede. "The act is rather weak," he observed; "It would have been better to leave us alone and let us proceed under the old act." The reason was, as the defense claimed, that "the act refers to street trading and not to anything in a house." So O'Neile was apparently warranted in storing music in his home. Stymied, Preston's lawyer had no option but to abort the prosecution. Tellingly, a moment after O'Neile walked, a barrow boy who had had far fewer pirated sheets in his possession came before the same judge and found himself with no such recourse because he had been operating in the street. He, by contrast, was punished.29

Preston's struggle with the pirates thus came to focus on questions of place. Was the location of a raid a home, or a warehouse? Was it a place of sale, or of storage? To what extent could police or MCA men obtain access? And, at a broader level, howwas piracy distributed geographically across the country? The pirates' tactics adopted the same focus. They began to appear in courts and in the press as heroic defenders of domestic privacy, and as upholders ofprovincial autonomy against the monopolizing tendency of the capital. Newspaper reports increasingly tended to classify piratical villains according to their place ofwork. This culminated in a social taxonomy. Pirates were classified into four broad but distinct kinds, reflecting their relation with private and public spaces.

The first class was that of men who sold sheets "in the public streets." Generally termed hawkers, these were the small fry of the trade, who often reappeared with new stock mere hours after a confrontation, refused to betray their sources, and rarely yielded more than ten to one hundred copies at a time- sometimes they carried as few as one or two.30 Preston and his men cornered innumerable such "travelers."Theywere everywhere, to the extent that in 1903 one legitimate publisher bewailed the fact that "all the business is now in the