Paris: Atlantic Library/Olympia Press, 1954

8vos, various pp., in yellow stiff paper wrappers, lettered in black to front and rear panels and white on black to spines. Top edges a little dusty, otherwise a fine unread set.

A COMPLETE RUN OF THE TEN VOLUMES OF THE OLYMPIA PRESS'S ATLANTIC LIBRARY, INCLUDING FOUR EARLY ALEXANDER TROCCHI TITLES, ALL PUBLISHED PSEUDONYMOUSLY.

A forerunner of publisher Maurice Girodias's hugely successful Traveller's Companion series, the Atlantic Library list looked to mix high art and low sex, and was the subject of constant police attention for its trouble. The imprint lasted little longer than a year, but it provided Girodias with the Traveller's Companion business model which kept customers satisfied and the authorities guessing for many years subsequently.

Alexander Trocchi [1925-1984] moved to Paris from Scotland in the early 1950s. There he edited the literary magazine Merlin, which flew the Existentialist flag and numbered Sartre, Genet and Camus among its contributors. The magazine proved better at making reputations than money, however, and Trocchi was one of a group of impecunious writers to be recruited by Maurice Girodias to write pornography for the Olympia Press, an English-language, Paris-based imprint catering for the wide variety of sexual tastes to be found among the city's Anglophone residents and visitors. But Olympia also had a more respectable face -- it published the first edition of Lolita, as well as work by Beckett, Burroughs and J.P. Donleavy -- and Trocchi was keen to join its roster of writers. To curry favour he supplied Girodias with two smutty potboilers written absolutely to the Olympia recipe: Helen and Desire and The Carnal Days Of Helen Seferis. Both were published under the pseudonym Frances Lengel. Trocchi then submitted Young Adam, an altogether more literary work. Girodias didn't like it for precisely that reason. The novel, preoccupied with sex (good) and death (less good), unfolds in an allusive, elusive writerly style which Girodias knew would be a turn-off for Frances Lengel fans. He sent Trocchi away to rewrite Young Adam in the Olympia house style. Trocchi did as he was asked, and as a result this true first edition of Young Adam is a sexed-up, dumbed-down version of the book which would later go on to make Trocchi's name. (Later editions reverted to Trocchi's original text). Trocchi's final contribution to the Atlantic Library list was the supposed fifth volume of Frank Harris's My Life and Loves: written entirely by Trocchi, it's by far the best book of the five. Young Adam was filmed by David Mackenzie in 2003, starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan.

Also on the Atlantic Library roster was the young Christopher Logue: writing as 'Count Palmiro de Vicarion' he is the author of Lust, the fourth volume in the series. And the list also contains an edition of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known now as Fanny Hill.

A superb unread set, and extremely scarce.

Kearney 4.1 to 4.10