Don’t Judge an Olympia Press Book by its Cover
A Parisian pornographer who modernised literature with Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias concealed counter-cultural classics behind deceptively drab covers.
Maurice Girodias is an unlikely candidate for the accolade of most groundbreaking publisher of the 20th century. He was a pornographer who lost all his money in lavish clubs and restaurants, a notorious scam artist and the man Valerie Solanas had intended to murder when she instead shot Andy Warhol on 3 June 1968. But, in Paris in 1953, he founded the Olympia Press and would go on to publish William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the SCUM Manifesto and other counter-cultural classics throughout the 1950s and 60s.
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