The Olympia Reader

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Selections from The Traveller's Companion Series EDITED BY MAURICE GIRODIAS Designed and Illustrated by Norman Rubington The Olympia Press was founded in Paris in the spring of 1953 by Maurice Girodias, "conceived," he writes, "as a desperate move on my part to escape complete social and economic annihilation." It followed in the footsteps of The Obelisk Press, owned by his father, "a Jewish gentleman from Manchester, an attraction to the ladies and an expert in elegant living, being the owner of seven bulldogs and fifty pairs of trousers," who died at the outbreak of World War II, "stricken by the sheer horror of it all." Girodias, after losing one publishing venture which achieved somé success despite the fact that its initial capital consisted of a ton of worthless black markét celery, and after living for three years in "near complete bumhood," began The Olympia Press on a shoestring. From the beginning it was unique among publishing houses. Located in Paris, it published in... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Selections from The Traveller's Companion Series EDITED BY MAURICE GIRODIAS Designed and Illustrated by Norman Rubington The Olympia Press was founded in Paris in the spring of 1953 by Maurice Girodias, "conceived," he writes, "as a desperate move on my part to escape complete social and economic annihilation." It followed in the footsteps of The Obelisk Press, owned by his father, "a Jewish gentleman from Manchester, an attraction to the ladies and an expert in elegant living, being the owner of seven bulldogs and fifty pairs of trousers," who died at the outbreak of World War II, "stricken by the sheer horror of it all." Girodias, after losing one publishing venture which achieved somé success despite the fact that its initial capital consisted of a ton of worthless black markét celery, and after living for three years in "near complete bumhood," began The Olympia Press on a shoestring. From the beginning it was unique among publishing houses. Located in Paris, it published in English. Its authors included somé of the greatest of the past and the present day, as well as a stable of young Americans and Britons sojourning in the world capital of art and eking out their small incomes with Olympia stipends. Many of its books could not at that time be published or imported into the United States or Great Britain. But despite this, the classics of the erotic and the written-to-order racy novels found their way throughout the world. American servicemen, especially, soon (continued on bacJc flap)
(continued from front flap) got to know what Girodias calls "the ugly plain green covers" of The Traveller's Companion Series. Despite the gay and insouciant air with which The Olympia Press defied convention and eonducted its business, a seriousness of purpose ran through the venture. Girodias was able to bring to the public an astonishing number of important writers-Miller, Durrell, Beckett, Genet, Sade, Burroughs-and a succession of brilliant gems: Candy, Lolita, Pinktoes, Stradella, I Hear Voices, The Young and Evil, Story of 0, The American Express, Madame Edwarda, and many others. This anthology gathers a rich harvest of the great, the near-great, and the inimitable Olympia entertainments, w7ith emphasis on excerpts that have never appeared in this country: a section from The Ginger Man omitted from the American edition, a gamy translation of Zazie never printed in America, and so on. Taken together, it constitutes perhaps the best existing collection of the ribald and erotic. Maurice Girodias has supplied an extensive introduction and lengthy notes - charming and informative- including a history of Lolita and the reason why no excerpt from it appears in this book. Vissza