Greenery Press is an American publishing house based in Emeryville, California, specializing in books on BDSM—especially femdom—and polyamory, with more than 50 titles in print at its height. Most of the list is non-fiction technique, ethics, and relationship craft; a smaller fiction and memoir line ran under the Grass Stain Press imprint. Sales topped 100,000 books per year. For kink readers who learned topping, bottoming, bondage, or non-monogamy from “the green books,” Greenery is the house that stocked the modern English-language how-to shelf.
History
Janet Hardy founded Greenery Press in 1991. In 1995 it merged with Jay Wiseman Books under the Greenery name. Hardy continued to run the company; Wiseman stayed on the board. In 2019, when editorial director Janet W. Hardy retired, Greenery closed its new-books program and stopped issuing new titles—leaving a finished catalog rather than an expanding one.
Program and Flagship Titles
Notable authors include Hardy herself, Dossie Easton, Jay Wiseman, and Midori. The best-known title is The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, translated into several languages and past 50,000 copies sold by 2004—polyamory’s crossover hit as much as a kink book. Core BDSM list entries include:
- Jay Wiseman — SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (2000)
- Jay Wiseman — Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook (2000)
- Dossie Easton & Catherine A. Liszt — When Someone You Love Is Kinky (2000)
- Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy — The New Topping Book (2003); The New Bottoming Book (2001)
- Midori — The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage (2001)
- Lorelei — The Mistress Manual (2000)
- John Warren — The Loving Dominant (2000)
- Andrew Conway — The Bullwhip Book (2000)
- Joseph W. Bean — Flogging (2000)
- M. R. Strict — Intimate Invasion (enema play, 2004)
- Lady Green — The Compleat Spanker (2000)
- Charles Anders — The Lazy Crossdresser (2002)
- Christina Abernathy / Laura Antoniou — Miss Abernathy slave-training manuals and the Erotic Slavehood omnibus (1998–2007)
Cultural Place
Coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Greenery Press specializes in off-color topics,” 2001) and Cuir Underground (“Small Pervert Presses Fill the Gap,” 1997) treated Greenery as the serious small press filling the gap between underground zines and corporate nonfiction. The list mixed feminist-aware SM education, Japanese bondage craft, femdom manuals, and poly ethics—exactly the bookshelf many late-90s and 2000s players actually used. Topping and bottoming books from Easton and Hardy became default recommendations in many munches; Wiseman’s SM 101 and bondage handbook taught risk-aware basics; Midori’s Japanese bondage title brought kinbaku aesthetics into English how-to form; Miss Abernathy’s manuals mapped erotic slave training as curriculum rather than pure porn.
Related topics: Janet Hardy, Jay Wiseman, The Ethical Slut, Midori’s kinbaku teaching books, femdom manuals, and the broader history of BDSM non-fiction publishing. Even with new titles stopped after 2019, Greenery’s backlist still defines what “read the manual first” means in English-language kink—and why so many modern educators still sound like they grew up on green spines.
