Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded successor to the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father, Jack Kahane. It mixed erotic fiction with avant-garde literary work and is best remembered for issuing the first printed edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In its mid-1950s prime, Olympia specialised in books that English-speaking markets could not publish without legal risk. Early on, Girodias used relatively permissive French attitudes to issue sexually explicit titles in both French and English. By the late 1950s French authorities began banning and seizing the press’s books. For adult readers tracing how SM classics and banned erotica reached print, Olympia sits beside Grove Press and the wider postwar underground of Traveller’s Companion green covers.
Traveller’s Companion and Ophelia Press Lines
Ninety-four Olympia Press publications were promoted and packaged as “Traveller’s Companion” books—usually simple text-only covers, each edition numbered. A much larger erotica line, Ophelia Press, used the same basic design but pink covers instead of green. That dual branding let Girodias sell portable English-language sex writing to travellers while also carrying more openly literary or scandalous titles under the parent imprint. The numbered series became a collector’s map of mid-century forbidden reading.
Authors and Landmark Titles
Olympia was the first publisher willing to print William S. Burroughs’s avant-garde, sexually explicit Naked Lunch, which soon became famous. Other major works included J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; Samuel Beckett’s French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Nexus, Plexus); Georges Bataille’s A Tale of Satisfied Desire; Pauline Réage’s Story of O—central to modern BDSM literary history; Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy; Alex Austin’s The Blue Guitar and Eleanore; and Robert Kaufman’s critical book on Scientology, Inside Scientology/Dianetics. South African poet Sinclair Beiles worked as an editor. Other authors included Alexander Trocchi, Iris Owens (as Harriet Daimler), and John Stevenson (as Marcus Van Heller). On the Traveller’s Companion list, Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom and Trocchi’s The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis underline how Sadean and modern erotic currents shared shelf space with pseudo-Homeric smut such as A Bedside Odyssey by “Homer and Associates” (Michael Gall).
Author Wars, Exile, and Later Incarnations
Girodias’s dealings with authors were often troubled, especially over copyright. Nabokov disliked the copyediting, the copyright assignment, and the press’s literary reputation. A long dispute over rights to The Ginger Man ended when Donleavy’s wife Mary bought Girodias out at what was supposed to be a closed auction. Forced to leave France in 1963, Girodias briefly reestablished Olympia Press in New York in the 1960s and in London in the early 1970s. In the United States, Grove Press later issued The Olympia Reader, a best-selling anthology drawing on popular Olympia material by Burroughs, Miller, Trocchi, and others. Another well-known collection, The Best of Olympia, first appeared from Olympia Press in 1963 and was reprinted by New English Library in 1966. Further incarnations—some with Girodias’s support—appeared in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Olympia Press has since been re-established and has operated from Washington, London, and Frankfurt.
For BDSM and erotica history, Olympia’s decisive gift is not a single dungeon manual but a distribution channel: Story of O, Sade’s orbit, Burroughs, Miller, and a portable green-cover series that smuggled extreme sex writing across borders when Anglo-American law still treated it as contraband. Related trails include BDSM publishers, Pauline Réage, and the Marquis de Sade’s print afterlife. The Paris office, the seizures, the author lawsuits, and the Grove anthology together mark Olympia as infrastructure for modern adult literary kink, not merely a footnote to Lolita.
