Olympia Press - Pornography or Art?

A large collection of Olympia Press titles is now to be sold from on behalf of the Danish collector Finn Edholm who contributed to the annotated bibliography by Patrick J. Kearney "The Paris Olympia Press" (Liverpool University Press, 2008).

An Enterprising Publisher 

In the first half of the 20th century, it was still against the law to publish erotic or pornographic literature. It was also difficult to have such works judged according to literary or artistic criteria. The authorities seized what could seem offensive, and the publishers were afraid to publish daring literature for fear of damaging their reputation. 

One publisher, however, dared breaking down this wall: The Frenchman Maurice Girodias (1919-1990) founded in 1953 Olympia Press in Paris. The publishing house was named after the French artist Édouard Manet’s scandal-causing painting of the courtesan Olympia. 

Maurice Girodias was the ingenious type, and his business methods were quite enterprising. He would write blurbs for unwritten books. He would then print a list of catchy titles and fancy pen names and send it to all his customers. If these ”preliminary novels” had what it took, his dealers would order and pre-pay for works that had not yet even been written. This way, he could afford to give advances to the hard-pressed writers, who in turn would come up with novels that fulfilled the expectations created by Girodias’ popular blurbs. 

Literary Masterworks 

Along with the easily read and soon forgotten erotic titles, Olympia Press published works that came to rank among the most important publications of the post-war era: Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch (1959) and not least Nabokov’s masterwork Lolita (1955). Many publishers had rejected Nabokov’s novel, before it was finally published by Girodias. 

Lolita was highly controversial, and many considered the book a questionable half-pornographic product without artistic merit. The book was soon banned in France, but when an American edition was published a few years later, it became a huge success. Lolita was the first title on the American market since Gone with the Wind to sell more than100,000 copies within the first three weeks. Today, the importance of Olympia Press is widely aknowledged, both in the history of literature, publishing and pornography. Last year Liverpool University Press issued the definitive bibliography of all the publications of Olympia Press. Much information in this bibliography was supplied from the Copenhagen Collection here presented, owned by Finn Edholm. 

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