The Dirty Secret of a Legendary Rare Book

Something happened to Maurice Girodias when he moved Olympia Press to New York during the late 1960s.

A bold and brave publisher in Paris but with a self-destructive streak, he would routinely scamper amongst cow-pies and deliberately splat a few; he was cavalier with business and casual regarding ethics. When he arrived in New York, he upped the ante by playing hopscotch in a mine field.

In September of 1969, Simon and Schuster published The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace. This was Wallace's novel concerning obscenity and censorship, its plot centering upon a bookseller accused of selling copies of a fictitious obscene book titled, The Seven Minutes by J.J. Jadway. As part of his research, Wallace had interviewed Girodias, at the time the world's most notorious publisher with Barney Rosset of Grove Press a close second.

Girodias was tipped to the upcoming release of Wallace's book and its content. He was not happy about the way Wallace had handled the Girodias-based character of Christian Leroux, a sleazy Paris publisher who had been the "original" publisher of Wallace's fictitious The Seven Minutes by J.J. Jadway. So unhappy was he that Girodias had a book quickly written purporting to be The "Original" Seven Minutes by J.J. Jadway that the Wallace book was based upon.

Additionally, in a grand, single-finger salute to Wallace, Girodias wrote an inflammatory Preface, which told the "real" story behind The Seven Minutes, of how he got a hold of the original manuscript, and how rotten he thought Wallace's novel was. He added a blurb to the front cover of the book, too, just to make sure Wallace got the message:

"The Last and the Greatest Underground Erotic Masterpiece...On which Irving Wallace Based His Bestselling Novel."

Suffice it to say, Wallace and Simon and Schuster got the message and they were not amused. They took legal action against Girodias, and the court ruled that Girodias had deliberately produced a book guaranteed to confuse the public and do harm to the publisher and the reputation of the author.

Girodias was ordered to destroy all 150,000 copies of the book's print run. In practical terms this was done by tearing off the front covers to provide proof and pulping the now defaced books.

Thus this book, with its great backstory, has become one of the most rare and desirable books in all of erotic literature.

And so I recently decided to conduct a census to determine just how many copies of this exceedingly scarce book were still extant.

Amy Wallace and her brother David Wallachinsky report that there is one copy, perhaps two, boxed up and in storage along with other books and items from their father's estate. Irving Wallace's personal copy(s): Monster association!

A private collector has one intact copy. I'd heard about this copy but did not know the owner. In a bizarre coincidence, he recently found me in regard to another matter. We established a correspondence and soon, in relation to O7M, he wrote: "I got it mail order. When I was collecting Olympia Press/Ophelia Press I had set up a notification of all new listings, for those publishers, on Abebooks.com. When the listing for The Original Seven Minutes by JJ Jadway came up I bought it. It was years ago but I didn't have to pay much for it $15 or $20. Sorry but I can't remember the bookseller involved."

An amazing bargain; the bookseller clearly didn't know what he had and how rare it was.

The actual author of Girodias' The Original Seven Minutes by J.J. Jadway, Michael Bernet, reports that he has three intact copies, and one with the cover removed.

So, a total of  six copies accounted for. There may two or three other intact copies in the hands of former employees of Giroldias. So, we have a strong estimate of nine intact copies extant.

But, at the end of his note to me, Michael Bernet declared that "I had them before they were condemned, unlike Girodias's partner who stole them from storage."

Ah, the mysterious and mythical missing box. This apocryphal tale has been floating around for decades with no solid evidence of the magic box of fifty's actual existence.

Until now.

Continuing the census, I asked a fellow I've been acquainted with for twenty five years, an erotica collector of some repute and casual scholar who once interviewed Girodias, was a  part-time now an occasional dealer who has not and will never list through third-party aggregators, about how many extant copies of  O7M he was aware of. To which he replied:

"Girodias did not remember how many boxes were shipped before the Court Order, but Girodias did give a full box of 50 copies to his partner [Ah! Stolen or gifted? Another choice tidbit about this book]. When he died access to them passed to a person very close to me. I can attest that the box of 50 mint copies was gifted by Girodias. My first mint copy came from this box."

To which I replied, "Your first mint copy?"

His response:

"The late bookseller Seymour Hacker secretly purchased dozens of mint copies of the first edition of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER from the lover of the deceased publisher. (Told to me by Hacker). For years he quietly put up a copy for auction every six months or so. This way he kept the price of the book in the thousands of dollars. It is enough for any one to know that I have at least one copy of 'Original Seven Minutes' in both mint and 'front cover removed' condition. It makes no economic sense to divulge how many total copies I have."

The ethical sense appears to be beyond him. This jus' ain't right.

Thus, The Original Seven Minutes is not a scarce book. With at least fifty mint copies extant, it is not even a rare book. With that many mint condition copies, a premium can't be placed on condition; almost every copy is brand new. Any copies in less than mint condition are the true rarities and, theoretically, should turn condition issues on their head.

The paucity of surviving copies in the marketplace of the first edition of O7M and their price is the result of the deliberate creation of an artificial shortage.

Making the Market

"Common sense tells us that the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to make them scarce, that is to reduce production" (Ernest Oppenheimer, diamond miner and marketer whose business would be swallowed by the De Beers cartel).

Until recently, De Beers completely controlled the international market for industrial- and jewelry-grade diamonds. Far from what we've been led to believe, diamonds are not rare. With the exception of large, multiple carat stones of exceptional clarity, color (meaning no color at all), and brilliance, diamonds are common. It was De Beers' paramount marketing strategy to control the price of diamonds by withholding their supply from the markerplace.

It is one thing for a rare book dealer to buy up as many copies of a genuinely rare book as they can acquire to set the market price. I have done this myself when, finding that there were only three copies of a certain book being offered worldwide on the Internet, I bought them all. I "made the market" for a book that was quite rare and, for a number of reasons, had been previously unknown to collectors of this particular genre of literature and possessed a degree of importance. Years later and long after my dealer involvement in that genre of collecting, that book remains quite rare with only a copy or two surfacing every now and then.

It is quite another thing to deliberately sell copies of a reputedly scarce book at an exorbitant price when you know that the book is actually common because you have access to four dozen or so from a private, clandestine stash and want to prevent your stratospheric price from nose-diving into Earth at Mach II, which would be a virtual certainty if the secret got out.  The operative plan seems to be to sell the last of the remaining copies on the day of death. Only afterward, while the dealer's carcass rots, when collectors begin to talk to each other - as like-minded collectors always do - will they discover that they've been had, big-time, that, far from being the coolest collector on the planet with a mint copy of a legendary rarity, they're just another collector with a book that everyone has; that the mint condition book they were told was scarce beyond belief in any condition and paid well into four figures for is actually worth, at best, $50-$100.

At that point, the only recourse left to the collector will be to visit the cemetery and autograph the dealer's grave in yellow. 

                 The reprint, OPS/3                                                     The controversial first edition, OPS/1     
Girodias lost a fortune when he was ordered to destroy all copies. But he made up for some his losses by issuing another edition of The Original Seven Minutes under the title Seven Erotic Minutes, without the offending Preface, without the J.J. Jadway byline, and without the wrapper blurb associating the book with Wallace's. With the news of the box of fifty copies of The Original Seven Minutes, that reprint may now be rarer than the original edition.

It may come to pass that more than 59 collectors will want to add the book to their collection. At that point, another generation down the line, the book may become scarce in the marketplace again. But it will be true scarcity, not bogus, as this example of professional misbehavior demonstrates.

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My thanks to Stuart Fanning for providing images of the two earliest editions of Girodias' Seven Minutes.

The facts concerning the case of Wallace & Simon and Schuster v Girodias/Olympia Press are drawn from the Introduction to Patrick J. Kearney's A Bibliography of the Publications of the New York Olympia Press (Privately Printed, Santa Rosa, 1988).

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Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.

One Touch of Venus (Library): Odyssey of an Imprint Part 2

The story so far: In One Touch of Venus (Library): Odyssey of an Imprint, Part I we find Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset on the ropes, desperate for money, and, in a deal with his paperbacks distributor, Kable News, establishing Venus Library. Venus Library flounders, Kable News' chief John Hayes seizes the imprint from Rosset, it becomes Venus Books, loses a a small fortune, and Hayes seeks a way out.

Enter Maurice Girodias.

John Hayes, who had been distributing Olympia Press - New York through his Kable News, was obviously aware of Girodias' troubles; he'd lost OP-NY for distribution when it entered bankruptcy. He offered to give Girodias Venus Books if he'd just keep it alive to feed Kable's distribution maw. With this distribution contract Girodias established Freeway Press. Apparently contractually obligated to maintain the Venus imprint, Girodias released as Venus-Freeway Press. And, apparently contractually locked by Kable into issuing at least six titles per month  and desperately scrounging for material, Girodias immediately began to reissue, yet again, some Olympia Press - Paris titles as well as many reissues of Olympia Press - New York books, and a host of the most unlikely titles: a paperback edition of Sax Rohmer's [Arthur Sarafield Ward] only work of non-fiction,  The Romance of Sorcery,  a survey of the occult originally published in 1914; seven books in a series entitled K'ing Kung-Fu by Marshall Macao [?Leonard Mears]; two dreary dirty books, Mama Liz Drinks Deep  and Mama Liz Tastes Flesh  anonymously written by Howard Reingold, ostensively part of "The Acid Orgy Trilogy"; An Astrological Guide to Living in the Age of Aquarius; The Office Worker's Manifesto; Pyramid Power; two reprints of novels that originally appeared in the pulp magazine Operator 5 in 1934;  a bio of Mohammad Ali, Ali: Fighter, Poet, Prophet,  and Springtime for Hitler (the title "borrowed" from Mel Brooks' film, The Producers) both co-written by Über-literary agent Andrew Wylie prior to his rise to power.

It had come to this for Maurice Girodias: He holds the dubious honor of being the only porn publisher in history to have his writers organize a strike. Bearing picket signs reading "Give Us Our Dirty Money," and "Pornographers' Kids Need Clothes, Too," in June, 1971 sixteen male and female Olympia Press -  New York scribes demonstrated outside his offices on Park Avenue South under the rubric Dirty Writers Of America. The DWA demanded royalties and was  upset that Girodias, the champion of literary freedom, now had forbidden humor in their books; he now had to issue trash to maintain his contractual commitment to Kable News; and the two hundred dollar check he wrote to Wylie as down payment for Springtime For Hitler, the seventy-third Venus-Freeway release and the last book that Girodias would ever publish,  bounced.

But in the meantime, Venus-Freeway Press' President Kissinger. (Double-take). No need to re-read the last sentence; you had it right the first time: President Kissinger.

It was a collaborative effort amongst Girodias, acclaimed erotic novelist Marco Vassi, Monroe Rosenthal and Donald Munson, and an as yet unidentified woman. The book's forthcoming release was the subject of a story in the June 12, 1974 issue of the New York Times; the novel was causing no small degree of consternation within the government. It seems that the Justice Department's Immigration and Naturization branch received an anonymous complaint, investigated, and discovered that Girodias had allowed his resident's visa to expire. Girodias was ordered to be deported.

The book itself? Printed and sent to the Kable News warehouse,  the entire shipment vanished within a day of its delivery. John Hayes, owner of Kable News, disingenuously reported to Girodias that he had absolutely no idea what happened to it. There is evidence implying that the complaint to the Justice Department came from Hayes himself, who may have a bad case of the willies: the legal climate vis a vis obscenity had, by 1974, turned distinctly chilly and Hayes no doubt recalled what had happened to Greenleaf Classics when they screwed with the government by publishing a brilliantly conceived and subversive, wild, lavishly and graphically illustrated edition of the U.S. government's Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography: Greenleaf's publisher and editor went to jail. Hayes also, apparently, objected to certain passages in the book.

I think it fair to assume that the objectionable passages were probably the ones that featured Henry Kissinger "having an affair with a German girl in whose closet he discovers an S.S. uniform. She confesses to him that her brother had been in the Gestapo and in their subsequent sex scene has her wearing the uniform and Henry a frilly French maid's outfit, with him walking around on his hands and knees while she straddles his back and whacks him with a riding crop," as Marco Vassi related in an unpublished autobiographical snippet provided to Olympia Press - NY bibliographer, Patrick J. Kearney; his intimacies with a Radcliffe girl at the Paris Ritz-Carlton, and "a strapping Prussian noblewoman in a Heidelberg inn." John De St Jorre reports that after Kable News refused to distribute the book, Girodias decided to distribute it himself and had friends and staff affix stickers to each copy reflecting the new situation but the book has disappeared off the planet; find a copy, you're an Antiques Roadshow winner.

With deportation, court cases, debts, and a long list of simmering antagonists plaguing him, in 1974 Girodias, yet again, entered bankruptcy with Venus-Freeway Press' failure. With a gift for self-destruction, and a "sometimes kama-kazi approach to his business" (Kearney), Girodias was the only major publisher of pulp-porn during the era to have lost money. That required special talent. The times had passed him by; his brand of provocative publishing had become commonplace as the freedoms he had fought so hard for had been won. And a great, if deeply flawed publishing genius and champion of literary freedom faded from the scene. He died in 1990.

As for Barney Rosset, still alive, he "wasn't the only publisher who took risks, but he was one of the most visible and uncompromising. Not everything he published was high-minded. Some of it aimed below the belt, and he was uncompromising about that too. His stubbornness made his achievements possible, but it also helped to undo him. At the end of the '60s, Grove moved into fancy offices, into film, and, to some extent, away from books. The repression of the '50s and freewheeling openness of the '60s were over, and other houses, now free from fear of censorship, took more chances. The left splintered. The feminist movement attacked him. Grove began to drift...Grove bought a six-story building and installed air conditioning, an executive elevator and a front door in the shape of a 'G.'

"The renovation was completed in 1970, and that was the year that Grove began to fall apart. Prompted by the success of I Am Curious,Yellow, Rosset, who had always wanted to be a filmmaker, bought foreign films as fast as he could find them. 'Barney was buying the entire output of Czechoslovakia, Poland, God knows, whatever,' [Grove editor Richard] Seaver said. 'None of them worked. Suddenly, all the money we'd made on Yellow was down the drain.'

"There was the growing sense that Grove had lost its mission. 'Things were already beginning to go into a tailspin,' said [Grove executive, Nat] Sobel, who had resisted the new emphasis on film and was fired. 'I almost think that Barney fired me to spare me from watching the company that I helped build fall apart.' The '60s had ended, and the hope was turning sour. Peaceniks gave way to militants. Grove's move from an upstart house to a media conglomerate made its anti-establishment posture seem more like a contradiction. The feminist movement gained strength, and Grove became a target.

"...The real-estate market collapsed, and by the end of 1971, Grove was deeply in debt. It sold its new building at a huge loss and suspended Evergreen. Meanwhile, other publishers were taking advantage of the more permissive environment, and there were fewer untouchable manuscripts. 'They had such a distinctive position, particularly in the '60s, as the countercultural publisher,' explained Morgan Entrekin, who merged Atlantic Books with Grove's backlist to create Grove/ Atlantic in 1993, several years after Rosset had left. 'As they moved into the '70s and '80s other publishers started to occupy the same ground.'

"Finally, in 1985, Rosset was forced to sell to the oil heiress Ann Getty and the British publisher George Weidenfeld. Rosset believed he would remain in charge. But a year later, on a snowy evening, he walked into the Bar Americain in Paris, where a group had gathered to celebrate Beckett's 80th birthday, and announced he'd been pushed out," as Louisa Thomas reported in Newsweek.

Barney Rosset's last hurrah would involve a return to the pulp-erotica (he HATES the term "pornography") of Venus Library to start a new line of paperbacks, Blue Moon, to reprint early erotic classics and publish new , original works in the same literate but sexually charged style.

And so ends the saga of Venus Library, a forgotten imprint significant for reprinting otherwise lost original American erotica of the clandestine era, publishing a few new books of true literary value, and issuing many volumes that were just plain weird, yet whose ultimate importance lies as an imprint whose ownership was bookended by the two greatest publisher-champions of literary freedom during the twentieth century, two men who had known - and tangled with - each other when Girodias originally came to New York and sought Rosset out as a partner.

"After intense negotiations... [MG's lawyer Leon] Friedman produced a draft contract that he thought was fair to both sides. Both parties agreed to the terms but at the last minute Girodias, according to Friedman, 'changed the numbers,' and the deal fell through. 'It was a good contract,' Friedman said, 'and Maurice would have made good money out of it. But his attitude was if the other guy wants to sign a contract, it can't be a good deal.' Girodias saw it differently. After it was all over, he wrote to Friedman: 'It's all like a bad dream, concocted by the Superman of sadism, Barney Rosset.'

" 'It's just as well we didn't get together,' said Rosset, who laughed when he heard the Superman epithet again. 'It wouldn't have worked.' " (De St Jorre, pp. 270-271).

The two publishers, though both geniuses quite different in the details, were possessed by the same fateful demons that assured their rise and guaranteed their fall.

____________


Part 2 is based upon Patrick J. Kearney's Introduction to his Bibliography of the Olympia Press- New York (Privately Printed, 1988); John De St Jorre's Jorre's Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press (Random House, 1994); The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing by Louisa Thomas; and sources cited in Part I.

One Touch of Venus (Library): Odyssey of an Imprint Part I

In a recent post, I mentioned one of Canadian poet John Glasscoe's novels, Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer, originally published in 1972 by Venus Library, and noted that Venus Library "evolved from Olympia Press- New York."

This is sort of true but far from the whole story. The history of Venus Library is much more tortured and I'll have to get on the rack and stretch out a bit to tell it.

Grove Press, a small hardcover imprint, was dying when Barney Rosset bought it for $3000 in 1952. Over the next decade, he built it into the premier publisher of avante garde literature in the United States. By 1962, Grove Press had become the "Little Giant of Publishing" according to a contemporary trade journal, whose mission was "to do things which stimulate people, to help them see new things, to broaden and irritate them, to give them pleasure and always to keep probing." Barney Rosset had become the leading exponent of literary freedom in the publishing world. It was said of him that "he has made more contributions to the cause of literary freedom than any other publisher of our day." Rosset had a simple publishing tenet: "If you feel a book has literary merit, you publish it. If you get arrested in the process you fight it." By being the first to publish in the U.S. the work of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Ionesco, amongst other literary luminaries, including Sade, and "Pauline Reage," as well as publishing the country's first literary journal of the contemporary avant garde, Evergreen Review, Rosset set a standard for American publishers that to this day few can match. His commitment to literary freedom had paid major dividends - by the mid-late Sixities he was rolling in dough.

But this kind of success can turn heads, and Rosset's was now spinning on its axis like the child's in The Exorcist: he was possessed by dreams of grandeur that diabolically undermined his fortune. He spent profligately, sinking small fortunes into ill-fated movie projects: he set up a film distribution unit to release I Am Curious-Yellow and a film adaptation of Henry Miller's  Quiet Days In Clichy in the U.S. He was in the big-time but money was now cascading out at a greater rate than it was coming in. And he now had tax problems. Releasing editions of his fine erotic and otherwise hardcover titles since the beginning through his Zebra and Black Cat paperback imprints, now he decided to establish a mass-market paperback line devoted exclusively to  erotica to mine the motherlode that had become the pulp-porn marketplace.

It was strictly a money-making idea, literary standards taking a back seat to the urgent need for cash flow. It was a scheme to provide Grove's paperback distributor, Kable News, with eight titles a month - John Hayes, Kable's owner, had been urging Rosset to get in on the porn bandwagon - and provide Grove with a transfusion of green at a time when it is bleeding red and in mortal danger. Kable wanted the deal and Rosset needed it: Grove's Black Cat and Zebra imprints were not issuing enough titles per month to satisfy their contract with Kable News, and Kable was threatening to drop the lines unless Rosset could fill-in with other titles.

Venus Library is born.

The original idea was to reprint vintage clandestine American erotica of the 1920s and 1930s in well-designed and printed paper editions. The imprint's original wrapper design was clean and simple: well-wrought, distinctive lettering of the title, subtitle and author against a plain, single color background with thin white margins, at the head Venus' elegant signature vignette - a highly stylized, abstracted Venus figure in black, a stemmed round form over an inverted heart sitting atop a goblet, whose shape clearly suggests head and neck above full breasts atop full hips. The paper used was high quality and acid-free, the typography excellent; no cheesy offset photo-reprinting of the original source edition. Grove Press' name appeared along the spine below the Venus logo and as copyright holder. The overall look was of reserved class.

Among Venus' early releases were the only open editions of the obscure American original erotic novels, M. Fontaine's Establishment and John Kruge, and a very nicely produced edition of La Tarantula, another American original, from 1934. La Tarantula was the second title in Venus' catalogue, and provided an inauspicious omen of things to come: two editions of La Tarantula had already been published by others in the prior year, 1968. And, too, it was late 1969 and the market for quality pulp-erotica was giving way to the demand for raunchier material with overtly sexual wrapper designs.

And so, by its twentieth release Venus Library had evolved. That twentieth title was Corporal Punishment by "Dr. Gerda Mundinger," a S/M-themed "case history" sexumentary. Gone was the understated elegance of the original wrapper design; now, though still very nicely designed the covers were photo-illustrated to grab the fickle porn-public's attention.

That they did. The photo-cover for Dr. Mundinger's pseudo-study depicts the back of a nude woman from knees to shoulders, a man's forearm entering the frame from the right, his hand wielding a whip. The quality of the paper had declined to the typically low industry standard. The vintage material was now photo-offset from the source editions. The whole affair must certainly have been an embarrassment to Rosset and sales were not the B-12 shot Grove so desperately needed. Additionally, and of primary significance, Grove owed Kable a fortune: According to Fred Jordan, who was then working as an editor at Grove, Kable News had been, as was customary for distributors with all their contract publishers, advancing money to Grove/Venus to cover printing costs but Grove/Venus had been collecting these advances far in excess of the number of books they were actually delivering to Kable. It was so bad that Rosset was forced to cede Venus Library to Kable to cover what he owed the distributor. This method of Kable News, to "help" out and allow  publishers to get in way over their heads then seize the imprint or magazine, was not exclusive to them; periodicals distributors (who controlled the paperback book business) were (and remain) a tough lot using many legal if ethically questionable strategies to advance their business interests.

Venus Library may not have been the financial savior to Grove that Rosset hoped it would be but its sales were still respectable enough for Kable News to want to keep the imprint in its distribution mix. Hayes, according to those who knew him a very likable salesman in the best sense, apparently, needed and wanted a "prestige" imprint to distribute - they had a way of lending respectability to a distributor and providing convenient "cover" for the less respectable material. Kable News had been distributing Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press - New York catalogue as its "prestige" line but Girodias was sinking and Hayes may have felt the need to hedge his bet if Girodias went under. Apparently part of the deal with Rosset was that Grove Press would continue to advertise Venus Library at the rear of copies from its Zebra line of paperbacks, an ad for Venus appearing at the rear of its sixth printing dated December, 1972 of Pierre Loüys Trois Filles et leur Mere, Mother's Three Daughters.

And so, in early 1972, Venus Library became the property of Kable News. The books looked exactly as they did under Grove's ownership, the only difference being that the name Grove Press was no longer to be found anywhere on the wrapper, and the copyrights were now under Venus Library with no location site provided. But based on appearances, it was quite reasonable to assume that Grove still owned Venus Library.

It remains unknown who ran and edited Venus Library for Kable News but the line  went into overdrive, releasing well over one hundred titles in 1972. At some point during 1972, though, Venus Library became Venus Books, it lost the imprint's original, distinctive logo, and its mail-order was handled by Irval Distributors in Long Island City, Queens, New York City, which appears to have been connected to Al Druss' G.I. Distribution, a shady operation. The imprint was sinking, financially as well as editorially.

It reprinted at least thirty of hack pornmeister Paul Hugo Little's "A. Granamour" flagellation fiestas, most of which had already been released by Greenleaf Classics, the era's leading publisher of pulp erotica; and a few retitled and reauthored Olympia Press - Paris titles. It had, in the main, become  a publisher of S/M-themed material that was generally not very well-written, though a few notable exceptions managed to be issued. Fanchon's Book by "Zane Pella" (the pseudonymous author of many above average soft-porn novels during the '60s under the name "Dallas Mayo;" the copyright for Fanchon's Book held by Gilbert Fox, the true author - why use a pseudonym when you out yourself on the copyright?), is a fine little contemporary original novel of lesbian dominance and submission. It published the only open edition of The Mistress & The Slave, a reprint of the Athens [London], Erotica Biblion Society [Leonard Smithers and/or H.S. Nichols], 1905  English translation of the French clandestine original, La Maitresse et L'Esclave  issued in Paris, ca. 1903, the story of the systematic sexual subjugation of an older man by a young girl reminiscent of The Blue Angel, an uncommonly sensitive and perceptive view of a man's dark fall into eros. Venus Library also issued the only reprints of two  novels by the infamous "Aime Van Rod" (a house pseudonym for Parisian publisher Roberts et Darallion's erotica imprints Editions artistique and Editions Parisiennes) - Our Fair Flagellants by Jeremy Hornell, an early translation of Nos Belle Flagellantes originally issued in 1907; and The Coming of Age of Françoise Cocteau,  the original edition in French and source translation yet to be identified - who in the first two decades of the twentieth century was responsible for over thirty-five fiercely sadistic novels noteworthy for their often complete lack of overt sexual behavior, that subject being too indecent for the modest female protagonist/victims to narrate, the scenes of viciously ferocious, unrelenting corporal punishment, however, just fine, thank you.  The best books in the Venus Library catalogue are 60s activist and key counterculture figure David Danziger's Hard Life, his memoir of sex and sensibility from St. Marks Place in New York's Greenwich Village to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, and poet John Glassco's Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer. How and why these little treasures wound up in Venus' line is a mystery but one we should be thankful for. The simplest explanation is that these two titles were likely leftovers from when Grove Press owned the imprint; they have the aroma of quality.



By the end of 1972, beginning of 1973, Venus was in disarray and Kable News' John Hayes was looking to unload the imprint. Perhaps the editorial was to blame. Perhaps the recession of the early 70s had negatively impacted sales, as it had for so many others: Venus' print runs appear to have fallen into the 7K-10K range; just a few years earlier, the average print run for a pulp erotica title had been upwards of fifty thousand copies. Perhaps Kable News' John Hayes, a distributor and not a publisher, couldn't provide the leadership necessary. But the most likely reason Hayes was seeking to rid himself of ownership, according to Kent Carroll, who worked as an editor at Grove and though not directly involved knew of the Grove-Kable deal for Venus Library, is that "he [Hayes] lost about a million on the arrangement." Rosset found a sucker in Hayes; now it was Hayes' turn.

Enter Maurice Girodias.
                                  

                                                                                                        to be continued...
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I am thankful to Barney Rosset, Kent Carroll, Fred Jordan, and Gilbert Fox who were kind to share their memories with me during of series of telephone, snail-, and e-mail interviews conducted between 2000 and 2002.
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Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.