News Weekly. In 1961 Sheppard and his wife sold Morgan's Bookshop and opened another in Anchor House, Sydney and yet another in North Sydney, before opening the Sheppard Bookshop at 104 Bathurst Street, Sydney. He became active in book trade and writers' associations, notably as president of both the NSW Booksellers Association and the Federal Booksellers Association and foundational treasurer of the Australian Society of Authors. He was also an active member of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. In 1968 Sheppard set up Alpha Books, an "aggressively Australian" one person publishing house operating in direct competition with the large multinational businesses dominating the Australian book publishing market in that period. Notable books published by Alpha included Joanne Stevenson's No Case to Answer (about the Melbourne–Voyager collision), Vince Kelly's A Man of the People (about Sir William McKell), and J. T. Lang's The Turbulent Years. Challenge to Australian censorship laws Sheppard had long supported freedom of speech, and wrote articles criticising Australia's banning of books by writers such as Stephen Linakis, Barry Hines, Stephen Vizinczey and Restif de la Bretonne and asking "why were these books banned?". During the mid-1960s he mounted a series of vigorous challenges to the restrictive book censorship laws in Australia. His actions ran the risk of him being fined or jailed by the authorities. Sheppard had been "annoyed" when in 1964 he had heard some British writers refer to Australia's "juvenile censorship laws" and he "decided to do something about it" by publishing in 1965, with the assistance of several colleagues including Leon Fink, a Sydney entrepreneur, and Ken Buckley, the secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, the book The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in Australia. At that time D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover had been designated, by the Department of Customs and Excise and under the Australian Commonwealth law, a "prohibited import" in Australia for four years, and The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, an account of the British trial about that country's ban of the novel, had recently been banned for importation into Australia. Sheppard realised that the Federal law which banned the import of those books from overseas did not prohibit anything printed by the Australian States. So he technically avoided the Federal ban by having friends in England airmail him a few pages of the book at a time, and then assembling the whole book and