Maurice Girodias

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Maurice Girodias bigraphy, stories - Book publisher

Maurice Girodias : biography

12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990

Maurice Girodias (12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990) was the founder of the Olympia Press. At one time he was the owner of his father’s Obelisk Press, and spent most of his productive years in Paris.

Footnotes

Death

On 3 July 1990, Girodias died of a heart attack. He was 71.

Legal troubles

Criminal

Girodias consistently ran into difficulties with the authorities throughout his career. The Paris police, often pressured by British customs, seized and destroyed many copies of his books. The courts would fine him, and by 1963 he found he had to leave Paris, first for Copenhagen, then for America, where Customs agents destroyed the microfilm copies of numerous TC titles Girodias possessed. He also got into serious trouble with Simon & Schuster and author Irving Wallace over a work called The Original Seven Minutes by J.J. Jadway. Copies of Girodias’ Olympia Press title had to be destroyed before reaching the bookstores.

His books were published in the United States under the Olympia Press, Traveller’s Companion and Ophelia Press imprints. After acquiring the Venus name from Kable News, who had taken it from Barney Rosset’s Grove Press in settlement of debts, Girodias published also under the Venus Freeway imprint, with distribution being handled by Kable News.

His erotic and hardcore pornographic books were published also in the United Kingdom, in West Germany, Denmark and in The Netherlands under the Olympia Press imprint. The first British edition of Story of O by Pauline Réage was published by Olympia Press.

"In 1964, Girodias was prosecuted for publishing obscene literature. He was sentenced on March 3 to a year in jail, banned from publishing for twenty years, and received a $20,000 fine. It was the most serious penalty ever imposed on a publisher for offenses listed outrage aux moeurs par la voie du livre. Girodias was probably ruined because of collusion amongst French, American, and British authorities … As a result, Girodias lost everything and was ruined."

In 1974 Girodias published President Kissinger using the Venus Freeway imprint, a controversial work of science fiction by numerous authors offering a dream of socialism starring Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Girodias, it is said, was set up by the authorities in a phony drug deal and invited to leave the country.

Civil

Girodias tended not to pay his writers, if he could avoid it, not to document his work, or even live up to his contracts. He was involved in litigation concerning Lolita, Candy, The Ginger Man, Stradella and O, among other works. In the cases of Candy and O, Girodias won, setting a great deal of copyright precedents. In the cases of Lolita and The Ginger Man, he lost.

The Olympia Press

Following a cold and difficult winter, Girodias one day met up with numerous hungry expatriates, many of them working for Merlin, a literary review. He famously advised the group that the way out of poverty was for everyone to come and write dirty books for his new venture, The Olympia Press, which took its name from the similarity to his father’s company and Manet’s famous portrait of a courtesan.

Among those who wrote for Girodias in the early days were American author Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, John Glassco and Christopher Logue. Trocchi, Glassco and Logue penned "db’s" ("dirty books") for the Atlantic Library Series, a short-lived line of erotica. Beckett published Watt and his Malone Trilogy through the more literary Collection Merlin. The South African poet Sinclair Beiles was an editor at Olympia.

After several police crackdowns, and to keep ahead of the authorities, Girodias shifted his imprints, replacing the Atlantic Library with the Traveller’s Companion Series, beginning with The Enormous Bed by John Coleman. Legal difficulties persuaded Girodias to include less openly erotic and more literary works in the series and no. 6, Denny Bryant’s Tender Was My Flesh was followed byThe Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy.