Alexander Trocchi Goes On The Lam

by Stephen J. Gertz

 "The most brilliant man I've ever met” (Allen Ginsberg).

A "unique and pivotal figure in the literary world of the 50's and 60's, an individual, that's it...they don't make 'em like that anymore" (William S. Burroughs).

"It is true, it has art, it is brave, I wouldn't be surprised if it is still talked about in twenty years" (Norman Mailer, on Cain's Book).

Mailer underestimated by at least thirty-three years.

In 1961, Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), the Glasgow-born novelist who, in Paris during the early through mid-1950s as the bridge between the Beats and Europe, had established himself at the center of a group of British and American ex-pat writers in Paris, and, in the late '50s moved to New York City, was in trouble, major big-time.

World literature's second most famous junkie author, William S. Burroughs taking the top spot, Trocchi had provided a sixteen year old girl with heroin. In response to an epidemic of heroin addiction that was non-existent, the United States Congress passed the Boggs Act in 1956,  draconian legislation that mandated the death penalty for providing heroin to a minor. The evidence against him overwhelming and, arrested and arraigned, Trocchi was released on bail. But while awaiting a trial that would have sent him to the electric chair if found guilty, Trocchi appeared in a televised debate about drug abuse. During the live proceedings he nonchalantly shot-up. He immediately became the face of evil. His bail was revoked and he was under threat of immediate re-arrest and incarceration. He had to get out of New York and the U.S., pronto. He had no money.

The income generated by his partner in addiction, his wife, Lyn, who prostituted herself to support their habits, was not sufficient to effect a getaway. He turned to a bookseller friend for financial help, writing him a letter.

That plea has just come into the marketplace, along with Trocchi's personal, hand-painted copy of Cain's Book (NY: Grove Press, 1960), his autobiographical novel and literary triumph, banned in Britain upon its publication there in 1963, recounting his days and nights as a writer in New York while working as a scow pilot on the docks, scoring junk and getting high. Trocchi was so far gone that he was unable to attend the book's release party.

After laying out his desperate situation, complicated by Lyn's arrest and the detention of their son, Marc, he makes the request on page two:

"This is probably the last time I'll ask you to do me a favor - for a long time anyway + in one way or another I'll get your good wishes back to you. Nothing is too little, nothing is too much. Please give it to Diane Di Prima or, if you like, she'll lead you to my hide out. Please keep all this secret until I am safely gone.

Yours, Alex T.

Front flyleaf note.

With the assistance of Norman Mailer, a major fan and supporter, Trocchi was spirited across the border into Canada, where he was met by Leonard Cohen, then a young, aspiring poet. A few days later, after surviving Trocchi's company - hanging-out with the mad Scot presented multiple opportunities for too much excitement, often at the same time - Cohen smuggled him aboard a steamer bound for Aberdeen, providing, to Trocchi's ecstatic relief, "enough Demerol to kill a herd of elephants."

Trocchi, who had been a leading literary light in Paris, publishing the acclaimed avant-garde journal, Merlin, and (along with his friends, including Terry Southern) writing erotica for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press (under the pseudonyms Carmencita de las Lunas and Francis Lengel), eventually settled in London and continued to write but published very little; his addiction was deep and taking its toll. He died of pneumonia in 1984. Almost immediately afterward, interest in his career became resurgent and intensified and he earned, the hard way, the post-mortem accolades accorded to a literary genius who channeled his gift through a 26-gauge needle squirting diacetylmorphine into his bloodstream in an existential rebellion to separate himself from a world he rejected and surrender in thrall to the muse of nothingness and, in the process, lose everything that remained meaningful to him.

This copy of Cain's Book - the most important copy imaginable - and this letter chronicle his most significant and lasting contribution to literature, his career height and the incident that, as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, instantly toppled him.

Here, Alexander Trocchi, A Life In Pieces, featuring William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen:

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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The Greatest Literary Hoaxster You've Never Heard Of

by Stephen J. Gertz

He was, by his own admission, “an accomplished liar” and a “great practitioner of deceit.” His (now very rare book in first edition) Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) is considered by many to be the most accurate image of Lost Generation Paris ever written yet it is, to a large degree, a memoir of convenience, the chronicle of a young Canadian ex-pat's life in Paris in the late 1920s - early 1930s as he wished it to be, with an keen eye toward writing a best-seller and settling a few old scores. It was  one of a handful of  autobiographical works he composed, each an exercise in apocrypha. 

It's no accident that the new, one and only, must-read biography of the man is subtitled "One Life of..." rather than "The Life of..." Acclaimed Canadian poet, memoirist and translator John Glassco (1909-1981) never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Later edition.

Glassco was born into generous circumstances in Montreal, and, while never wealthy, was fortunate to enjoy a comfortable income from a family inheritance. His early years in Paris were recalled in Morley Callaghan’s memoir, That Summer in Paris and in Robert McAlmon’s The Nightenghouls of Paris. He began his career as a literary hoaxster in Paris, in 1928, when, with Kay Boyle (with whom he had a brief affair), he ghostwrote Relations and Complications (1929), the memoir of Gladys Palmer Brooke, the Dayang Muda of Sarawak.  (Yes, Virginia, there once was a Dayang Muda of Sarawak, to ne'er be confused with Jack Kerouac). The Dyang Muda’s memories were, apparently, so startlingly memorable that she, according to Boyle, was stunned to complete silence leaving Glassco and Boyle to pretty much make the whole thing up.

When your father subjects you to corporal punishment with a little too much gusto and afterward affection and your mother is sexually aroused by your pre-pubescent cries and screams it’s well nigh all but a certainty that erotic flagellation will become a deep-seated fetish that will haunt and inform your personal and professional life. It will lead you to write the most popular sado-masochistic porn novel ever written in English, an instant classic upon publication - anonymously in one edition, under a pseudonym in another - a book that, Glassco true to form, is actually two different books, variants of the same story with the same characters - and both books, in their first few chapters, his near word for word translation of a French flagellation novel from 1913!

The English Governess by Miles Underwood
Pirated edition.
Originally published Paris: Ophelia Press (Olympia Press), 1960.
A rewritten and abbreviated version of...

Harriet Marwood, Governess by Anonymous.
First edition, New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Originally written in 1954 as A Firm Hand.

He had a gift for stylistic mimicry, which came in handy when he decided to  complete, and seamlessly so, Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished work of erotica Under the Hill (aka Venus and Tannhauser). His   pornographic poem, Squire Hardman (which he mischievously ascribed to George Colman the Younger, a once popular British dramatist and writer of the late eighteenth- early nineteenth centuries), and Victorian porn  were composed in pitch-perfect period English meant to deceive the reader into believing them to be genuine eighteenth and nineteenth century works.

Under the Hill by Aubrey Beardsley & John Glassco.
First edition, Paris, Olympia Press, 1959.

First American edition.
New York: Grove Press, 1959.

So, too, with a seventeenth century pederastic Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku,  translated by Hideki Okada, with an Introduction by Glassco. Temple of Pederasty was, actually, written  by Glassco in his “erotic collage” method: take a book, in this case, Quaint Stories of the Samurais, a 1928 translation, issued by Glassco’s friend and fellow ex-pat in Paris, Contact Press publisher Robert McAlmon, of a Japanese book from 1687 titled Nanshoku Okagami, and enhance, enlarge, and engorge  it with sex.

The Temple of Pederasty by Ihara Saikaku.
Translated by Hideki Okada. Introduction by John Glassco.
First edition. North Hollywood: Hanover House, 1970.

Let us not forget the now exceedingly scarce in its first edition (it took me five years to find a copy) Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer, Glassco's paean to male submission, female domination, and black latex-wear that "Sylvia Bayer" kindly, with tongue in cheek (or someplace else), dedicated "To John Glassco."

Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer.
First edition. New York: Venus Library, 1972.

Just now released, A Gentleman of Pleasure is the long-awaited biography of Glassco, one of the most fascinating characters of twentieth century literature in English yet one, for the most part, completely unknown. That should change with this thoroughly researched, engaging, and elegantly written book. Author Brian Busby, who has edited several literary anthologies, and is author of Character Parts: Who’s Really Who in Canadian Literature (2003) untangles the complex life and many literary deceptions of Glassco, whose  career as a writer tentatively began in the 1920s and continued with fits, false starts, and time off for bouts of tuberculosis and gentleman farming until, finally, in his 50s, the late bloomer began to blossom.

By the 1960s his poetry - ultimately in four volumes,  The Deficit Made Flesh (1958); A Point of Sky (1964); Selected Poems (1971); and Montreal (1973) - edited anthologies of Canadian poetry, and translations of French Québécois verse into English found their place in the first rank of modern Canadian literature, and Glassco was elevated to the artistic status he so long desired and deserved. Overtly, he was a highly respected Canadian man of letters. Covertly, he was a master of the literary hoax, thoroughly enjoying his deceptions. He moved from one world to the other and back again with the graceful ease of a shapeshifter to the manor born.

After reading the book it's easy to like the man; it may, also, be easy to dislike him. Masochists can be  very demanding. But  it is simply impossible, I think, not to be in sympathy with John Glassco.

And so “we end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. In this way we grasp the truth that a man is not only a living creature but the person of his own creation” (John Glassco on Giacomo Casanova, in Memoirs of Montparnasse, as cited on the bio's quotation leaf).

Glassco in 1976, shortly after his 66th birthday.

"Black-leather dandy, and elegant, martini-sipping beat, John Glassco was a one-man, literary underground. Impeccable in style and provocative in intent, his pornography is poetic, his poetry is arty, but all his writing has the precision and grace of beautiful lies. Yet, his genius has gone too long unheralded and unsung in his native land. Bravo to Brian Busby, then, whose exhaustively researched, exquisitely written, and endlessly interesting biography reveals Glassco's vivid complexity, intricate deceptions, and the convoluted genesis of his deathless triumphs in memoir, translation, lyric, and, yes, his odes to the joys of womanly sadism and boyish masochism. Busby gives us a detailed portrait of a grand bon vivant and a singular intellectual, who was likely English Canada's most gifted, truly radical writer" (George Elliott Clarke).
                                                                                          
BUSBY, Brian. A Gentleman of Pleasure. One Life of John Glassco. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. Tall octavo. Hardcover. 398 pp.
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Booktryst readers may recall an earlier post of ours, Our Man in the Attic, concerning Mr. Busby.

Take a look at Brian Busby's The Dusty Bookcase, his blog devoted to Canadian literature, high and low, and his new blog devoted to Glassco.
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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.

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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.