The Dusty Bookcase: Olympia Press

Showing posts with label Olympia Press. Show all posts

01 April 2013

The Heart Accepts It All – John Glassco

The first day of National Poetry Month seems a good time to mention my forthcoming book The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco. I've never been much good when it comes to salesmanship, so will leave the task to publisher Véhicule Press.

From their catalogue:

A brilliant and enigmatic literary figure.

Decades after his death, John Glassco (1909-1981) remains Canada’s most enigmatic literary figure. The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco draws back the curtain on this self-described ‘great practitioner of deceit.’ We see the delight he took in revealing his many literary hoaxes to friends, and the scorn he had for literary fashion. The letters reflect his convictions about literature, other writers and his own talent, while documenting struggles with publishers, pirates and censors.

Born into one of Montreal’s wealthiest families, Glassco turned his back on privilege for a life in letters. At age eighteen, having been published in Paris, his voice suddenly went silent. His unexpected return to the literary scene in 1957 coincided with the great flowering of Canadian literature. In the years that followed, he produced a unique body of work that encompasses poetry, memoir, translation, and several bestselling books of pornography.

Collected here are the few surviving letters from his youthful adventures in France and three previously unpublished poems. Amongst his correspondents were Maurice Girodias, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ralph Gustafson, Leon Edel and Margaret Atwood.

It's an honour to again find myself associated with this great talent.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

01 March 2012

Freedom to Read Week: Under the Hill

Under the Hill

Aubrey Beardsley, completed by John Glassco

Paris: Olympia Press, 1959

An elegant favourite, in both appearance and content, I've written about Under the Hill here and in my biography of John Glassco. There will be few words today... just some images of a work that was seized and destroyed by French authorities. This is one of roughly 1500 copies that escaped the flames.

Related posts:

Canada's Olympians (Part II)

Three Centuries of Piracy

A Dutch Treat

06 July 2011

Bottoms Up, Shy Photographer

Reading The Queers of New York a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about Jock Carroll, under whose editorial direction the book was published. A fine photographer, but not much of an editor, he's at least partly to blame for the novel's failings. Truth be told, Carroll wasn't much of a writer either, though he did have a number of titles to his credit. The first edition of Bottoms Up (1961) is the most sought-after, but only because it was published by the infamous Olympia Press. Carroll's only novel, it is perhaps the blandest piece of writing Maurice Girodias ever passed off as "erotica".

It's a wonder that Bottoms Up thing ever made it into print – that it was republished seems not improbable, but impossible. And yet, for more than a decade the novel was available in one form or another. There were at least thirteen editions, published in six counties, making Bottoms Up one of Canada's all-time best selling novels. Carroll once boasted that it had moved close one million copies. The editions below go some way in backing up his claim.

Bitte recht scharf

Bremen: Schünemann Verlag, 1963

Not only the first translation, but the first hardcover edition in any language. The German was followed by Italian (Il Fotografo Timido, 1967) and Danish (Den blufærdige fotograf, 1969) translations.

The Shy Photographer

New York: Stein & Day, 1964

Retitled, Carroll's novel kicked off Stein & Day's "Olympia Press Series". Short-lived, ill-fated, the series actually began and ended with The Shy Photographer. The cover was also used on the first British edition, published in 1964 by Macgibbon & Kee.

The Shy Photographer

New York: Bantam, 1965

The first and only legal American paperback edition. "Candy with a camera!" exclaims, um... whoever wrote the cover copy, I guess.

The Shy Photographer

London: Panther, 1965

"The novel that's loaded with heaven-ly nudes". Not true.

The image was also used for the 1970 German paperback edition.

Bottoms Up

Covina, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967

A pirated edition produced by the notorious Marvin Miller. "FIRST AMERICAN PRINTING" is the claim. Again, not true.

The Shy Photographer

London: Panther, 1967

A droog takes a photograph. Whoever designed the second Panther edition seems to have been intent on representing both titles.

Wholly unappealing. And is not superimposing the author's name across some guy's ass just a tad insulting?

Il Fotografo Timido

Collana: Longanesi, 1970

The first Italian paperback edition recycles the hardcover image (which was in turn borrowed from the Bantam paperback). Of all the translations, the Italian is by far the most common.

Il Fotografo Timido

Collana: Longanesi, 1972.

A later Italian edition, the last in any language, continues the tradition of misrepresentation. Protagonist Arthur King does not become a photographer for Playboy, and at no point does he don a pair of purple panties.

There has never been a Canadian edition.

Related post:

Canada's Olympians (Part IV)

05 October 2009

Pictures of Harriet

Google Harriet Marwood, the heroine of John Glassco's The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess, and you'll find the top site brings this image of a 'Professional Disciplinarian and Spankologist' located in New York City. The visitor is told that this 'no nonsense lady... takes her inspiration from a renowned, stern English governess of longstanding literary fame and believes in the expert application of all manner of traditional domestic corporal discipline as needed and/or deserved.'

I'm not so sure this is how the author imagined his creation, though I can say with great certainty that the modern Ms. Marwood's clothing isn't at all correct.

Glassco commissioned dozens of illustrations for his erotic works – Squire Hardman (unused), The Temple of Pederasty (banned), Fetish Girl (rejected) and The Jupiter Sonnets (unpublished) – but nothing at all for Harriet, governess to Richard Lovel. The only sense we have of how Glassco saw his creation is found in his writing. Here she is, as first viewed through the eyes of Richard's father:

Mr. Lovel saw before him a tall young woman in her middle twenties, dressed with quiet elegance. A brunette with a very white skin, she wore her dark, almost black hair in a plain style under her small bonnet, parted from forehead to crown and drawn smoothly back to a heavy chignon at the nape of her strong, graceful neck. Her brow was well-shaped and intellectual, the nose was straight, short and full of energy, the mouth rather wide, with full underlie, the chin quite prominent. Everything in her face and pose denoted decision and force; but her glance, reserved, serious, even academic, could not conceal the warm brilliance of her violet-grey eyes.

The first published version of Harriet and Richard's romance, The English Governess (Paris: Ophelia, 1960), had no cover illustration; nor did the reissue Under the Birch (Paris: Ophelia, 1965). It wasn't until the appearance of the more polite telling of this love story, Harriet Marwood, Governess (New York: Grove, 1967), that the heroine was finally depicted.

As with Fetish Girl, Glassco hated the cover. Here he complained that the model, 'though well constructed', had 'the countenance of a mental defective'.

This poor failed Harriet reappears recast on the cover of the 1970 Grove edition of Yvonne; or, The Adventures and Intrigues of a French Governess with Her Pupils, an erotic novel first published in 1899.

Of the other depictions of the flagellating governess, Glassco would have only seen the first two. Sadly, his opinions are unrecorded.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid [Harriet Marwood, Governess].

Anonymous [Gerrit Komrij, trans.]

Amsterdam: Uitgeversij de Arbeiderspers, 1969.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid? Rough translation: Discipline to Tenderness.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

John Glassco

Toronto: General, 1976.

The lone Canadian edition of the cleaner version, and the only one to be printed under Glassco's name. It features an intentionally misleading Preface written by the author.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

Anonymous

New York: Grove, 1986.

An edition that perpetuates the misconception that the novel dates from the time of Queen Victoria. From the back cover: 'A curious exploration of the private lives of outwardly uptight Victorians... Alongside such classics as My Secret Life, Pleasure Bound, A Man with a Maid, and The Pearl, Harriet Marwood, Governess takes its place as one of the outstanding works of erotic fiction produced in the Victorian era.'

The English Governess

Anonymous

New York: Masquerade, 1998.

Harriet as a poor man's Bettie Page. There is nothing in the packaging to suggest that the book doesn't take place in the 'fifties.

The English Governess

John Glassco

Ottawa: Golden Dog, 2000.

The sole Canadian edition of The English Governess, and the only one to appear under the author's real name. It has a great advantage over previous editions in that it features a highly informative introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

Recommended highly.

Later that same day: Roger Ebert writes of books and his inability to rid himself of the 'scandalous The English Governess', bought 'in a shady book store on the Left Bank in 1965'.

A longer version of this post – more pictures! – appears at A Gentleman of Pleasure, a blog devoted to things Glassco.

28 February 2009

Canada's Olympians (Part IV)

Bottoms Up

Jock Carroll

Covina, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967

Strange to think that this novel, which receives no mention in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, sold something close to one million copies. It is an astonishing figure, one that comes from the author himself - and, Jock Carroll's reputation being what it is, I don't doubt it for a second.

Carroll was a very good journalist and a gifted photographer, but not much when it came to writing fiction; it's no great loss to Canadian letters that Bottoms Up was his only novel. That said, this is a pleasant enough read, capturing something of a heady time when magazines were flush with cash and booze flowed freely. A fish out of water story, it centres on Arthur King, a Swampy Cree from the shores of Hudson Bay and his zany adventures as a photographer for Light, a New York-based magazine. Along the way he encounters tough-talking journalists, a prostitute with a heart of coal and a human cannonball who fancies himself a great painter. But none are so interesting as Gloria Heaven, a character modelled closely on Marilyn Monroe. Carroll famously spent several days photographing the screen goddess near the start of her career, shots that were later published in Falling for Marilyn: The Lost Niagara Collection. His writing about the encounter suggests little embellishment; Gloria and Marilyn share the same background, body, behaviour and reading material (Thomas Wolfe, The Prophet and The Thinking Body by Mabel Ellsworth Todd). Conversations that Carroll says he had with Monroe are also found in the novel.

According to the author's son, Carroll shopped Bottoms Up around, finally turning to Olympia Press after he'd exhausted the North American houses. Maurice Girodias accepted the manuscript, but only after it had been spiced up. The paprika is easily seen, a light sprinkling of ribald talk here and there, without any great concentration. There are no sex scenes in Bottoms Up, and I think only two passing references to the posterior. It's not at all surprising that the novel holds the distinction of being the only Canadian work published by the press to have escaped the censor.

Olympia published Bottoms Up in 1961 as part of the Traveller's Companion Series, but the real sales would have begun three years later when it appeared in England and the United States as The Shy Photographer. Handsome hardcovers from Macgibbon & Kee and Stein & Day where soon followed by mass market paperbacks.

'Candy with a camera!' proclaims the Bantam edition. Well... not really. To truly appreciate where Carroll's talents lay, I suggest Falling for Marilyn and Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (the focus of Glenn Gould Estate v. Stoddart Publishing Ltd., Carroll's posthumous triumph).

Object: My copy was pirated by Collectors Publications, run by the dishonourable Marvin Miller, the very same gentleman who two months earlier ripped off John Glassco's The English Governess as The Governess.

Access: Very good copies of the first edition are generally priced at between C$30 and C$50, twice that of the Collectors Publications edition. As The Shy Photographer, it's pretty thick on the ground - paperbacks from Panther and Bantam, the Macgibbon & Kee and Stein & Day hardcovers - all can be bought for as little as C$5. The Stein & Day edition is the most interesting as the first and only book produced as part of its aborted 'Olympia Press Series'.

Related posts:
Bottoms Up, Shy Photographer

Canada's Olympians (Part I)
Canada's Olympians (Part II)
Canada's Olympians (Part III)

20 February 2009

Canada's Olympians (Part III)

The English Governess

Miles Underwood [pseud. John Glassco]

Paris: Ophelia, 1960 [sic]

In his seventy-one years, John Glassco produced five books of verse, eight volumes of translation, and the prose masterpiece Memoirs of Montparnasse, but not one approached the sales he enjoyed with The English Governess and its sister book Harriet Marwood, Governess. Both stories of flagellantine romance between a boy, Richard Lovel, and his beautiful governess, Harriet Marwood, they're easily confused and are often described as being one and the same. Harriet Marwood, Governess, though published second, is actually the older of the two. In 1959, it was offered to Maurice Girodias, but the publisher thought it too tame. Glassco then rewrote the novel - apparently with the help of his wife - slashing it by more than half and ramping up the sex. Made to order, as The English Governess it was quickly accepted and appeared within ninety days under Olympia's Ophelia Press imprint.

The English Governess was a immediate success, a favourite in a market that relied almost exclusively on word of mouth. Reprinted after just three months, on 10 January 1961 it was suppressed by French authorities under a decades-old decree targeting 'périodiques et ouvrages de provenance étrangère'. As was his practice, Girodias reissued the banned novel using a different title: Under the Birch: The Story of an English Governess. Not much of a disguise, but more than enough to baffle the brigade mondaine. The novel has since appeared as The Governess (a pirated edition) and the misleading The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, an English Governess.

Trivia: Glassco chose not to be identified as the author, selecting Miles Underwood as a nom de plume. He kept his secret for over a year, and only began to reveal himself when seeking legal advice from F. R. Scott concerning Girodias' non-payment.

Object: My copy, printed by Taiwanese pirates, is a cheap reproduction of the first edition. I'm assuming that the novel was divided in two so as to enable the rusty staple binding.

Access: Typically found only in academic libraries, though the enlightened citizens of Toronto and Vancouver will find it on their shelves. Used copies are plentiful and inexpensive. The first edition isn't often offered for sale, and can't be had for anything less than C$300. While British and American editions are currently in print, the Canadian is recommended. Published in 2001 by Golden Dog Press, it includes a very informative Introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

Related posts:
Pictures of Harriet

Canada's Olympians (Part I)
Canada's Olympians (Part II)
Canada's Olympians (Part IV)

12 February 2009

Canada's Olympians (Part II)

Under the Hill

Aubrey Beardsley, completed by John Glassco

Paris: Olympia, 1959

Beardsley devoted a good portion of his short life to this retelling of the Tannhaüser legend, and returned to it repeatedly until the last cough.

While Glassco claimed that he first read an expurgated version as a boy (unlikely), and that he hand copied the true text as a McGill University student (possible), it wasn't until 1948 that he began this completion of Beardsley's work. He picks up the abandoned thread mid-way through the tenth chapter, then, following the legend and Beardsley's rough plan, adds a further nine. Glassco doesn't create so much as a seam - despite introducing personal interests not shared by the dead Decadent: flagellation and the touch of the governess. In his completion, Glassco has Tannhaüser attend a performance of Pink Cheeks, a pantomime-operetta that is advertised as 'Two Hours of Fun & Flagellation'. Later, while in Rome to seek absolution, the Minnesänger sets out to transcribe his sins, lest he forget any transgression before the Holy Father. In doing so, he casts his mind back to the governesses of his childhood: Mlle Fanfreluche, with whom he'd shared 'merry games at bedtime', and a later woman who had first introduced him to the pleasures of the birch.

In the summer of 1965, French authorities seized Under the Hill. The unsold stock, more than half the print run, was threatened with destruction. In defending the book, publisher Maurice Girodias was placed in the absurd position of having to prove Beardsley's reputation as a respected artist in a court of law.

The charges attracted interest from the London's New English Library, which quickly published a paperback edition to capitalize on a Beardsley revival, fuelled by an immensely popular retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Yet, despite all this excitement and interest across La Manche, Girodias lost his case. In August 1966, all copies of the elegant Olympia Press edition seized eleven months earlier were condemned to the flame.

Glassco was heartbroken, and could not understand the decision in that he'd never thought of Under the Hill as pornography: 'It is romantic, rococo, faisandé, Huysmanesque, playful, madly affected, solidly in the tradition of dandyism; it's even got a highly moral ending, with Tannhaüser officially damned & trapped forever under the hill. I wouldn't be in his elegant slippers for anything.'

Tannhaüser Before the Hill of Venus

Trivia: Under French law, Glassco, as copyright holder, should have been charged alongside the publisher. After the court case was lost, Girodias wrote the author: 'Curiously, and strangely, the prosecuting magistrate preferring to consider that you did not exist, and that you were a figment of my imagination, if you pardon the expression. I did not oppose that view naturally.'

Object: Under the Hill looks nothing like any other Olympia Press book. Illustrated by Beardsley, printed on heavy stock, bound in green watered silk, and issued in a numbered edition of three thousand, it was a extravagant production that Girodias would never repeat.

Access: A common title, but one not usually found in public libraries. Under the Hill continues to be published in the England and the United States; there has never been a Canadian edition. Used copies can be had for as little as a few dollars. Given its beauty and history, the first edition seems surprisingly inexpensive - generally between C$75 and C$200. Copies currently offered by Canada's online booksellers are priced at well over twice as much as those listed by their European and American brethren. Make of that what you will.