The Paris Olympia Press »

Patrick Kearney runs the Scissors and Paste Bibliographies website. A world-renowned bibliographer, Kearney is the author of An Annotated Bibliography of the Erotica Collection of the British (Museum) Library, among other titles.

Angus Carroll is chief marketing operator of a library information specialist firm.

The Paris Olympia Press, successor to the famed Obelisk Press, run by Obelisk-founder Jack Kahane’s son Maurice Giriodas, picked up where Obelisk left off. The “dirty books” published by the Paris Olympia Press grew even dirtier than Kahane’s most explicit publications, and Giriodas’s avant-garde literary endeavors soon outstripped those of his father. The first to publish William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the Paris Olympia Press drew acclaim and controversy for its literary contributions during the “golden age of erotica,” a time when starving artists and intellectuals, academics and journalists, wrote erotic fiction under the cover of pseudonyms to pay the bills.
 
In The Paris Olympia Press, renowned bibliographer Patrick Kearney compiles a detailed account of the Press’s publishing activities, including biographical sketches of its authors, an introduction to the Press’s literary achievements, and a complete bibliography of works published. An extensive illustrated study, The Paris Olympia Press catalogs and comments on the early work of some of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Acknowledgements     viii
Preface to the First Edition   Maurice Girodias     x
Olympia Press Timeline     xiv
Introduction     1
Olympia Press Imprints
Olympia Press (1953-1959)     23
Collection Merlin (1953-1955)     65
The Teasers (1953-1954)     81
The Atlantic Library (1954)     89
The Traveller's Companion (1955-1965)     103
The Ophelia Press (1958-1960)     251
La Grande Severine (1960)     279
Ophir Books (1961)     285
Far-Out Books (1961)     295
Olympia Magazine (1962-1963)     303
Othello Books (1962)     313
Odyssey Library (1963)     321
Books Banned in France     329
Non-Olympia Titles     350
Sales Catalogues     356
Author Sketches     364
Index of Titles     392
Index of Authors, Illustrators and Translators     397