n Trevor Hoyle
The trials and temptations of a wayward publisher Maurice Girodias and the founding of Olympia Press White Thighs Until She Screams Sin for Breakfast Cruel Lips Inch by Inch Tender Was My Flesh There’s a Whip in my Valise
N
o, that’s not the Eng. Lit. reading list for next year’s Open University. Actually, it’s a choice selection of titles from the infamous and much-soughtafter DB* catalogue issued by Paris-based imprint Olympia Press during the two decades following World War II. Sole proprietor of Olympia – editor-in-chief, head of sales, book-keeper, office boy – was our hero Maurice Girodias; every perfect inch the darkly good-looking Frenchman, Maurice was charming, mysterious and dangerously attractive to women. Surprisingly he was in fact half-English and carried a British passport. His father, Jack Kahane, hav* Dirty Books
Maurice Girodias, publisher
ing started out in the ragtrade in Manchester, moved to Paris in the ’30s and set up the Obelisk Press, which as well as pornography also published the banned novels Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn by American ex-pat Henry Miller. Though a bit of a lad and a rascal, relishing the good life, the money he made from porn was always a means to an end for Maurice. Like his dad he had a genuine, heartfelt passion for daring and imaginative works of literary merit at
the cutting edge – plus a discriminating eye for new talent. Maurice was 20 when war broke out. He was detained by the Gestapo and taken in for questioning and, because his name – it was then Kahane – was Jewish, he was about to be deported to the camps until an influential relative, an uncle, intervened and he was released. To avoid further danger, Maurice changed his identity papers to his mother’s (non-Jewish) name of Girodias, which he retained thereafter. In August 1944 Maurice was on the barricades, throwing Molotov cocktails at retreating German tanks, and shortly after witnessed the entry of General Leclerc’s Free French Army into the capital. As captured later in The Mandarins, the novel by Simone de Beauvoir, there was a “heady mixture of hope and despair that swept through Paris following its liberation.” ColdType | May 2020 | www.coldtype.net
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