Maurice Girodias - The Olympia Press

The Olympia Press

Following a cold and difficult winter, Girodias one day met up with numerous hungry expatriates, many of them working for Merlin, a literary review. He famously advised the group that the way out of poverty was for everyone to come and write dirty books for his new venture, The Olympia Press, which took its name from the similarity to his father's company and Manet's famous portrait of a courtesan.

Among those who wrote for Girodias in the early days were American author Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, John Glassco and Christopher Logue. Trocchi, Glassco and Logue penned "db's" ("dirty books") for the Atlantic Library Series, a short-lived line of erotica. Beckett published Watt and his Malone Trilogy through the more literary Collection Merlin. The South African poet Sinclair Beiles was an editor at Olympia.

After several police crackdowns, and to keep ahead of the authorities, Girodias shifted his imprints, replacing the Atlantic Library with the Traveller's Companion Series, beginning with The Enormous Bed by John Coleman. Legal difficulties persuaded Girodias to include less openly erotic and more literary works in the series and no. 6, Denny Bryant's Tender Was My Flesh was followed byThe Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy.

Other famous titles published in the Traveller's Companion Series were Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, a translation of Story of O by Pauline Réage, and Candy by Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern.

Olympia imprints included Ophir Books, The Ophelia Press, Othello Books.