This Act was passed to limit the amount of harmful reading material being exposed to children and young persons, and as a response to the rise in popularity of horror comics amongst children and young people in Great Britain during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Act applied to any book or magazine which was likely to fall into the hands of children or young persons and consisted wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures (with or without the addition of written matter), being stories portraying:
in such a way that the work as a would "tend to corrupt a child or young person into whose hands it might fall".
