The notorious Girodias

And so it went on. ‘It was great fun,’ said Girodias. If the
Atlantic Library and the Traveller’s Companion series
brought him notoriety as well as money, he welcomed it. He
was wholeheartedly committed to his task, and took a special
pleasure in outraging the authoritarian powers of his father’s
homeland. ‘The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked,
invaded, infiltrated, outflanked, and conquered by this erotic
armada,’ he wrote. ‘The Dickensian schoolmasters of England
were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was stand-
ing on end beneath their wigs . . .’
Dealers and private customers would cross the Channel
from England to Paris just to stock up on Olympia titles, stuff-
ing as many books into their pockets and suitcases as they
dared, risking the ignominy of being unmasked and arrested
as pornographers at British customs.
Girodias’s pioneering mission spawned mercenary initia-
tives, much to his annoyance. The Olympia titles began to
fetch high black-market prices, pirate editions of some of them
appeared, and there was even a circulating library operated by
a Soho bookseller, from which the customer could borrow The
Chariot of Flesh or The 120 Days of Sodom,'leaving behind a
fee and a large deposit, the latter to be reclaimed upon return
of the book. There must have been many a frustrated cus-
tomer who, on hearing that a new consignment of the olive-
green paperbacks had arrived in London, skulked down to
Soho and paid his money, only to find that he had been lent
Molloy. Or, perhaps worse, that he had entrusted his deposit
to the bookseller for the privilege of procuring page after page
of euphuistic description of encounters between French trans-
vestites and homosexuals in Our Lady of the Flowers.

He published Lolita which caused a world-wide sensation:

Brian Boyd: _ Twenty-six-year-old Dmitri Nabokov had let a
self-styled publicity agent persuade him to stage a fake cast-
ing contest for the part of Lolita. . . . For two days his Milan
apartment was invaded by ‘decidedly postpubescent aspir-
ing nymphets, some with provincial mothers in tow’. When
his father saw a magazine photograph of the ‘finalists’ sur-
rounding Dmitri on his over-sized, satin-covered bed, he
cabled his son at once to stop the ‘Lolita publicity’ imme-
diately.
Brian Boyd: The process of vulgarization would ultimately
lead to such horrors as the life-size Lolita doll with ‘French
and Greek’ apertures.
Groucho Marx: I’ve put off reading Lolita for six years, until
she’s eighteen.
Brian Boyd: As a Lolita movie looked more and more possi-
ble, he warned Minton that he ‘would veto the use of a real
child. Let them find a dwarfess.’
Girodias: I decided to open a futuristic, multi-levelled night-
club in Paris. For five years I certainly had a lot of fun with
that new toy, but it lost me much more money than it ever
made Q . . and as a side effect forced the Olympia Press into
bankruptcy as well.