The heyday of Parisian erotica

Maurice Girodias was the most daring avant-garde publisher in English of the post-war era. His Paris-based Olympia Press took on Samuel Beckett at a time when no British publisher wanted him, Vladimir Nabokov when Lolita was considered unprintable, William Burroughs when The Naked Lunch was regarded as obscenely incomprehensible, The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy, as well as translations of risqué works by Jean Cocteau and other French authors.

Olympia flourished for a dozen or more years from 1951. Its best known list, the Traveller’s Companion Series, specialised in supplying titles such as The Wisdom of the Lash and Bottoms Up to British tourists, American GIs and any other ‘traveller’ in search of cheap Left Bank company in the form of an erotic tale. The convenient narrative holds that Girodias issued the dirty books (DBs, as they were known to the British and American men and women who produced them) in order to subsidise the ‘literature’ – which is how Barry Reay and Nina Attwood refer to his more serious material in Dirty Books, their study of porno production before and after the second world war. But the opposite is surely the case. The extravagant trash that spurted from the pens of some otherwise talented writers owes its continued existence to the link with Olympia’s catalogue of once untouchable modern classics.

Olympia’s dirty books included Lust by Count Palmiro Vicarion, the sole effort by the English poet Christopher Logue, later to represent parts of Homer’s Iliad in startlingly modern form. Logue’s friend and fellow expatriate Alexander Trocchi was among Olympia’s most prolific authors, coming up with Thongs by Carmencita de las Lunas, a murky tale of whipping and branding in, of all places, the Gorbals of Glasgow, and the more sensitive Helen and Desire,under his customary pseudonym Frances Lengel.