Greenery Press: The Green How-To Shelf for BDSM and Polyamory

Greenery Press is an American publishing house based in Emeryville, California. At its height it was a major English-language publisher of BDSM, fetish, and polyamory books. The list was written for adults who had already agreed to what they were doing: technique and ethics, not a crime manual. At the peak, more than 50 titles were in print, and sales passed 100,000 books a year. Most of the list is nonfiction, on technique, ethics, and how relationships are actually run. For readers who learned topping, bottoming, bondage, or non-monogamy from “the green books,” Greenery was the shelf.

Janet Hardy founded Greenery Press in 1991. In 1995 it merged with Jay Wiseman Books and kept the Greenery name. Hardy went on running the day-to-day business. Wiseman stayed on the board. In 2019, when editorial director Janet W. Hardy retired, Greenery closed its new-books program. The list stopped growing. What remained was a finished catalog. That backlist is still what a lot of English-language kink means by “read the manual first,” and a lot of later educators still sound as if they grew up on those green spines.

Nonfiction was the bulk of the program. Fiction and memoir came out under the Grass Stain Press imprint. The books people actually handed around include Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s The New Bottoming Book (2001) and The New Topping Book (2003), default recommendations at many munches for how to bottom and how to top with the risks in view. Jay Wiseman’s SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (2000) and Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook (2000) taught players to recognize risk and to learn the basics. Midori’s The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage (2001) turned Japanese rope aesthetics into an English how-to. Lorelei’s The Mistress Manual (2000) and the Miss Abernathy slave-training manuals by Christina Abernathy / Laura Antoniou (1998–2007) set femdom and erotic slave training out as a curriculum, not as porn by itself.

Other titles covered narrower ground: John Warren’s The Loving Dominant (2000), Andrew Conway’s The Bullwhip Book (2000), Joseph W. Bean’s Flogging (2000), Lady Green’s The Compleat Spanker (2000), Charles Anders’s The Lazy Crossdresser (2002), and M. R. Strict’s Intimate Invasion (2004), on enema play. Whips, spanking, crossdressing, and that kind of intimate play each got a book. Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt’s When Someone You Love Is Kinky (2000) is about partners and friends who are trying to live with the fact that someone close to them is kinky.

The other book Greenery is known for is The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities. It has been translated into several languages. By 2004 it had sold more than 50,000 copies. It is the polyamory title that left the small scene, and it is also a kink book, about honesty and ethics inside more than one relationship.

Press coverage treated the house as the outfit filling a gap. In 2001 the San Francisco Chronicle said Greenery Press specialized in off-color topics. In 1997 Cuir Underground, in “Small Pervert Presses Fill the Gap,” called it the serious small press between underground zines and commercial nonfiction. The list mixed feminist-aware SM education, Japanese rope, femdom manuals, and polyamory ethics. That is the shelf many players in the late 1990s and the 2000s actually used. The books are about what consenting adults do, and about the ethics of doing it. They are not a crime manual. After new titles stopped in 2019, the old ones stayed on the shelf.