4)  Published in Paris – Olympia Press and Co. 1929-1965

One obvious option for the more adventurous / bohemian UK publisher keen to avoid domestic arrest was simply to print his material elsewhere then try and smuggle it back into England through the post.  Paris was the natural destination of choice for such itinerant smut-peddlers, partly due to its simple proximity (the gear only had to be got through UK Customs at one of the Channel ports), and partly due to laissez-faire Gallic indifference – our French cousins have long considered it beneath them to be able to read any language other than their own, and habitually turned a blind eye to what a few Anglais ex-pats might have been up to around Rue Saint Honore.  However this mini-hive of industry didn’t really get going until the 1930s, when one shrewd publisher grasped the possibilities of the city’s endless swirling tourism: British holidaymakers (and later Servicemen) would queue up to purchase cheaply-printed English-language versions of banned UK titles / classic European porn, then later either leave these abandoned in their hotel rooms, or (if they were feeling exceptionally brave) try and smuggle them back home through Customs buried under a pile of old socks.

Possibly the first pioneer of note to take advantage of this situation was Charles Carrington (1857-1921), born Paul Ferdinando in Bethnal Green, where he was sequentially an errand boy, van boy and lavatory-attendant before beginning to sell books from a barrow in Farringdon market.  He moved to Paris in 1895 to publish / retail on Rue Fauberg Montmartre – some of his output was legitimate classical literature by Aristophanes and Wilde etc, but this was largely just a blind for the porn.  He was one of the first writers to publicly identify flagellation as a distinctively English vice, and was soon getting on the police’s nerves: according to Chief Inspector Drew in 1908 “Carrington has been a source of considerable annoyance to the police here, by the persistent manner in which he has been carrying on his business through the post in the shape of sending catalogues and books of a very obscene and vulgar character”. This attention forced a brief sojourn in Brussels, though he was soon back and up to his old tricks – one of his most famous titles is the now-celebrated ‘Raped on the Railway – a true story of a lady who was first ravished then flagellated on the Scotch Express’.

Other contemporary publishers who followed Carrington across the Channel include Edward Avery (1851-1913) who offered such classics as The Whippingham Papers, and the shadowy William Lazenby (?-?) who published the infamous journal The Pearl (among much else).  As with Smithers and Nichols however, happy endings here tend to be in short supply: syphilis sent Carrington blind, and he spent his final years in wretched poverty (after a mistress stole his valuable collection of rare books) before dying in a lunatic asylum in Ivry-Sur-Seine.  Are we beginning to detect any sort of pattern here?

Charles Carrington’s Paris Catalogue of 1906, and a typical available title

Slightly more respectable (though perhaps not that much) are a famous father-and-son team.  Jack Kahane (1887-1939) was born in Manchester, the son of Romanian immigrants, and wrote moderately racy novels under various pseudonyms including Cecil Barr.  When the Depression forced his original publisher Grant Richards into bankruptcy, Kahane set up a partnership with printer Herbert Clarke of Imprimerie Vendome (on Rue Saint Honore) and launched his own imprint the Obelisk Press in 1929, whose basic USP became issuing material that would have been subject to prosecution in England.  This included both straightforward dirty books (or ‘dbs’ as he dryly nicknamed them) and more substantial / serious work by such as Miller, Joyce and Lawrence etc etc.  Kahane also made a point of reprinting anything previously banned in England, including various titles already discussed like Well of Loneliness, Sleeveless Errand and Boy (among many others).

Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias (1919-1990) carried this notion even further.  Barely out of his teens he took over the business on his father’s sudden death (on Sept 2nd, the day before War was declared) then eight months later adopted his mother’s surname to conceal his Jewish heritage from the invading Nazis.  In 1953 he launched the Olympia Press and ran it for a dozen trailblazing years, until a major Obscenity prosecution in 1964 finally forced him out of the country, at first briefly to Denmark then the following year to America where he continued to publish under various mixed imprints.  By far his most famous line was the iconic ‘Traveller’s Companion’ series with its dark green text-only covers, though he also published straight erotica as the Ophelia Press (same design but pink).  Two of his best-selling brand-name authors for the latter were the infamous ‘Marcus Von Heller’ (actually West Country journalist John ‘Steve’ Stevenson 1930-2017) and ‘Harriet Daimler’ (actually New York socialite Iris Owens 1929-2008).

Setting aside the lurid output of Marcus and Harriet, Girodias was directly responsible for publishing some of the most significant modern fiction of the post-war era, but his reputation is to say the least mixed.  He tended to avoid paying his writers if he could, ignored contract details when they didn’t suit him, and regularly reprinted authors without their knowledge in order to dodge royalties.  He had bitter long-running legal disputes with both Nabokov and JP Donleavy (to name but two), and even Stevenson eventually left him, disillusioned, in 1961 to return to England to become a Civil Servant (oh the Shame).  Maurice was finally scuppered in the mid-70s via the mix of an IRS tax-investigation and fallout from his publication of a controversial Scientology expose (which earned him powerful, if nutty, enemies).  Busted in possession of dope (which he swore had been planted) he was obliged to return to Paris and died there in July 1990, inconveniently having a heart attack in the middle of a radio-interview complaining how unlucky he habitually was.  Several other professional porn-men (lacking his much-vaunted literary pedigree) curtly dismiss him as a “dishonest louse”.  Overall, he seems best viewed as an irrepressibly opportunist agent-provocateur.

Father and Son:  Jack Kahane and Maurice Girodias in Paris

Plenty of other Parisian publishers saw the obvious gap in the market Kahane had pioneered and followed his example.  Two notable early names are Marcel Servant’s Vendome Press (1937-53 – Marcel was one of Jack’s early printers) and Marc Ritzmann’s Editions Astra (1926-59 – latterly owned by his daughter Jacqueline).  Vendome printed racy originals with striking jacket artwork, while Astra stuck to Classic (ie out of copyright) erotica in plain wrappers.  Slightly later names (with at least half a dozen known titles to their credit) would include Colombia Books (possibly US?), Editions Du Grand Damier (Serge Krill), Mediterranean Press (Bronislaw Kaminsky), Oceanic Press (Pierre Delarue – one of the bigger lines with 21 titles), Pall Mall Press (Patrick Garnot, who ran several other imprints), and WeekEnd Books (Kaminsky again).  All of these were clearly modeled on Girodias’s template and deliberately aped his plain (text-only) jacket style (with minor variations in colour / layout).  Their content was also notably stronger than the older Vendome / Astra titles, and by the mid-60s was essentially nudging hardcore.  But by that point their unique influence / popularity was already on the wane.  The legendary ‘Published in Paris’ phenomena essentially drew to a natural close following Girodias’s departure (combined with the near-simultaneous abandonment of US literary-censorship in 1967, which we shall get onto later).

If, as noted, holidaying bibliophiles wished to bring such classics as The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe back to peruse in the comfort of their own homes, they first had to somehow get them through UK Customs.  And HMC were not about to let that happen if they could possibly help it, although for a long time were bashful about openly admitting this.  Top-secret ‘Books Which Are To Be Seized As Indecent Or Obscene’ blacklists were regularly issued internally to Customs officers from the 1920s, but their existence was flatly denied in public right up until 1958, and even then the actual contents remained confidential for a further dozen years or so (the argument being that any reproduction could only act as free advertising for the publishers).  Few people were brave enough to object to the resulting confiscations, and internal HMC correspondence from 1954 notes there had in fact only been two formal challenges in twenty years, both of which had failed in the courts anyway.

We can consider two individual Lists in some detail, to get an idea of the developing context.  The first, from July 1954, is reproduced in Alan Travis’s ‘Bound & Gagged – a Secret History of Obscenity in Britain (2001).  The second, from Dec 1969, is currently available online as an Olympia Press fan-website download (search “Part 34: Indecent or Obscene” to find it).

Various Olympia Press classics…

The 1954 List comprises about forty items (chiefly English-language, though with a handful still in their original French).  However to keep matters simple only their English titles are given here, as all bar one (Joujou, or the Transvestite Libertines [1936] by Liane Delorys) were subsequently translated anyway.  The HMC list simply features title and author – publishers (plus dates for a few of the more obscure entries) have been added below:

*The Amorous Adventures of a Gentleman of Quality by Fernand Kolney  (Astra)

*The Amorous Adventures of a Lady of Quality by Marie-Louise Laurent-Tailhade  (Astra)

*The Amorous Exploits of a Young Rakehell by Guillaume Apollinaire  (Olympia)

*Ananga Ranga of Kalyana Malla [trans. Burton]

*The Bedroom Philosophers by De Sade  (Olympia)

*Black Spring by Henry Miller  (Obelisk)

*Boy by James Hanley  (Obelisk)

*Children For Shame by Rowena Ripston  (Vendome 1949)

*Courtesans, Princesses, Lesbians by Marie-Louise Laurent-Tailhade  (Astra)

*Dialogues of Luisa Sigea by Nicholas Chorier  (Astra)

*Fanny Hill by John Cleland

*Fleshly Prelude by Robert Sermaise  (Vendome 1948)

*Gamiani by Alfred De Musset  (Mont Venus Press 1952)

*Guide to the Science of Caresses by Claude & Francois Gerland  (Red Rose 1948)

*I Shall Spit on Your Graves by Vernon Sullivan  (Vendome 1949)

*Justine by De Sade

*Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana [trans. Burton]

*Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence

*Lady Take Heed by Cecil Barr [ie Jack Kahane]  (Obelisk)

*Erotic Trilogy by Paul Verlaine [a compilation of three earlier poetry collections: Friends,   Women and Men]

*The Romance of My Alcove by Paul Perret  (Erotika Biblion Society)

*Love Counts Ten by Theodor Zay  (Obelisk 1938)

*The Love Orchid by Eric Wensleydale  (Vendome 1938)

*Max and the White Phagocytes by Henry Miller  (Obelisk)

*My Life and Loves by Frank Harris

*Nadja – Russian Morals Before the War by M. Kerrels  (George Conrad 1938)

*Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

*The Perfumed Garden by Sheik Nefzawi [trans. Burton]

*The Romance of Lust by WS Potter  (Erotika Biblion Society)

*The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller [5 vols: Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn + Plexus, Nexus & Sexus]  (Obelisk / Olympia)

*Secret Love by Dr Jaf  [Jean Fauconney]  (Librarie Artistique 1931)

*To Sin I Was Constrained by Marjorie North  (Moon Press 1930)

*Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Celine  (Chatto 1934)

*Where Love is Fear by Andre Foucault  (Vendome 1948)

Vendome 1949 / Vendome 1948 / Editions Astra 1952

As might be expected (given the subsequent activities of Girodias & co) the 1969 List has grown exponentially, to the point where attempting to enforce it must often have seemed a Sisyphean exercise in futility.  Inevitable confusion over continually changing standards post-1959 means that it has now had to be split into two parts (Books Which Are Regarded as Indecent or Obscene / Books Which Are NOT Regarded as Indecent or Obscene) and there is also a lengthy Appendix B of ‘Importers Concerned With Indecent or Obscene Books’ which runs to an impressive 54 individual company names and addresses.  We shall return to this Retail angle later, but must first try to concisely summarise the book-lists.

The second (NOT Obscene) list features 26 titles that the authorities have reluctantly changed their minds about, having either lost recent trials or been forced to concede that sheer antiquity has finally rendered them innocuous.  These are:

Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen / Bessie Cotter by Wallace Smith / Candy by Terry Southern / Eve by James Hadley Chase / Justine by De Sade (though only the cut version) / Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence / Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr / Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov / My Life & Loves by Frank Harris / Naked Lunch & Soft Machine by William Burroughs / Our Lady of the Flowers & Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet / Rosy Crucifixion (5 vols as per above) by Henry Miller / Stradella by James Sherwood / To Beg I Am Ashamed by Sheila Cousins / Ulysses by James Joyce / Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.

However, if that seems a measured retreat it should be immediately pointed out that List 1 – ‘Books Which ARE Regarded as Indecent or Obscene’ – now runs to a whopping 123 titles (including Fanny Hill at a venerable 220 years old).  Realistically, all we can really do here is select a representative handful of the more memorable titles involved:

Chariot of Flesh by Malcolm Nesbit / Cruel Lips by Marcus Von Heller / Houses of Joy by Wu Wu Meng / How To Do It by Gustav Landshot / I’m For Hire by Marie Therese / The Lascivious Abbot by LH Walker / The Loins of Amon by Marcus Von Heller / Motel For Sin by Lilian Beatty / Ordeal of the Rod by R Bernard Burns / Pink Toes by Chester Himes / School For Sin by Frances Lengel / Scream, My Darling, Scream by Angela Pearson / Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe by Humphrey Richardson / Tender Was My Flesh by Winifred Drake / There’s a Whip in My Valise by Greta X / Under the Birch by Miles Underwood / Unusual Training by Vera Claythorne / Whips Incorporated by Angela Pearson / Whipsdom by Greta X

…and many, many more, coming soon to a false-bottomed suitcase near you!

To be quite fair, as previously noted the 1969 list represents the ‘Published in Paris’ phenomenon approaching the end of its life.  Almost all of the titles featured are at least five years old, with America rapidly emerging as the newly-liberated engine room of production-line erotica.  We can return to this part of the story later, but first have to jump back to the uptight England of 1954, and the notorious ‘Great Purge’ crackdown that finally forced a major (and decisive) change to our antiquated Obscenity laws….

 

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(5)  The Great Purge and The Jenkins Act 1954-59