Maurice Girodias launched Olympia Press in Paris in 1953, taking over the Obelisk Press his father Jack Kahane had run and putting a new name on it. The house printed avant-garde literature next to erotic fiction. The publishing fact it is most remembered for is the first printed edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. That is a fact about an edition, not a retelling of the novel. In the mid-1950s Olympia specialised in books that English-language markets could not publish without legal risk. Early on, Girodias used France’s relatively permissive climate to issue explicit work in both French and English. By the late 1950s French authorities were banning and seizing the books. For adult readers tracing how SM classics and banned erotica reached print, Olympia sits beside Grove Press and beside the postwar underground of Traveller’s Companion green covers.
Ninety-four Olympia publications were promoted as Traveller’s Companion books, usually simple text-only covers, each one numbered. A larger erotica line, Ophelia Press, used the same basic design with pink covers instead of green. The split let Girodias sell portable English-language sex writing to travellers while putting the more openly literary or scandalous titles under the parent imprint. The numbered series became a collector’s map of mid-century forbidden reading.
Olympia was the first publisher willing to print William S. Burroughs’s avant-garde, sexually explicit Naked Lunch, which soon became famous. The list also 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, a central text in 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. The 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 shelf, the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom and Trocchi’s The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis sat with pseudo-Homeric smut such as A Bedside Odyssey, credited to “Homer and Associates” and actually written by Michael Gall. Sade, in this history, is a name on a print list, not a crime manual.
Girodias’s dealings with authors were often sour, especially over copyright. Nabokov disliked the copyediting, the copyright assignment, and the press’s literary reputation. A long fight over the rights to The Ginger Man ended when Donleavy’s wife Mary bought Girodias out at what was supposed to be a closed auction. Forced out of 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 of 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. The press was later re-established and has operated from Washington, London, and Frankfurt.
For BDSM and erotica history, Olympia’s decisive gift is not a dungeon manual. It is a distribution channel. While Anglo-American law still treated extreme sex writing as contraband, the house moved Story of O, Sade’s orbit, Burroughs, Miller, and a portable green-cover series across borders. The Paris office, the seizures, the author lawsuits, and the Grove anthology are the record of that channel. Lolita is the famous edition. The SM history sits in the rest of the list.
