sold 4 million copies and was selected in 1952 to become an example of how paperback books were promoting moral degeneracy by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. The Committee concluded their investigation with a report that required publishers to conform to certain moral standards in the content and publicizing of their books, or else face fines or imprisonment. As a result, authors were forced to limit their stories to fit these requirements. However, as the decade went on, publishers became bolder in printing material that might be judged as immoral. Spring Fire and the establishment of a formula Accounting for the success of Women's Barracks, it is not a coincidence that Gold Medal Books published another paperback with lesbian themes, and in fact, eventually published some of the least homophobic books in the genre. Spring Fire, by Marijane Meaker writing as Vin Packer, is generally considered to be the first lesbian paperback novel, since the plot focused on the relationship of the two main characters, as opposed to the various relationships examined in Women's Barracks. It is also the first modern lesbian novel written by a lesbian. Spring Fire, which was published by Gold Medal Books in 1952 and sold more than 1.5 million copies, is about two college girls, Mitch and Leda, who fall in love and have an affair. Spring Fire inspired one of the best-known authors of lesbian pulp, Ann Bannon. Bannon wrote to Meaker after reading the novel, and Meaker convinced her to submit her own manuscript to Gold Medal Books for publication in the genre. The tragic endings of Women's Barracks and Spring Fire (suicide and insanity) are typical of lesbian pulp novels. Meaker was told by her editor that because the books traveled through the mail and anything sent through the U.S. Postal Service was subject to government censorship, publishers had to make sure that the books seemed in no way to proselytize homosexuality. No character was allowed to be both homosexual and happy at the story's end. A character had either to turn heterosexual and end up coupled with a man or, if she remained homosexual, suffer death, insanity or some equally unappealing fate. The first exception to this formula, and technically not a pulp fiction, is the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, published in hardcover by Coward-McCann under the pseudonym of "Claire Morgan". It