The Atlantic Library, a complete run, comprising: 1) René Roques, Three Passionate Lovers. A novel, translated from the French by Peter Leroy. 2) Frances Lengel [pseud. for Alexander Trocchi], Helen and Desire. 3) René Roques, Ladies at Night. A novel, translated from the French by James O'Leary. 4) Count Palmiro Vicarion [pseud. for Christopher Logue], Lust. 5) John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill]. 6) Frances Lengel [pseud. for Alexander Trocchi], Young Adam. 7) Frances Lengel [pseud. for Alexander Trocchi], The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis. 8) Robert Desmond, An Adult's Story. 9) Thomas Peachum [pseud. for Philip Oxman], The Watcher and the Watched. 10) Frank Harris [but Alexander Trocchi], My Life and Loves. Fifth Vo

[Trocchi (Alexander), et al.]

Published by The Atlantic Library by The Olympia Press, 1954

About this Item

FIRST EDITIONS (with the exception of the second volume, the sole printings in this form), pp. 188; 201; 190; 218; 248; 190; 183; 206; 286; 186, foolscap 8vo, original orange wrappers, the front covers lettered in black within a white border, the backstrips lettered in white against a black ground, some light spotting to textblock edges and a modicum of spotting to margins of covers, some volumes with a few faint spots to free endpapers, but a remarkably well preserved set overall, very good. Scarce as a set, the majority also uncommon individually, 'The Atlantic Library' of Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press was a forerunner of the more enduring 'Traveller's Companion' series, both in format, roster and content (literary smut). Its stable of authors was largely formed of British and American intellectuals looking for easy money in return for sexed-up potboilers, with nom-de-plumes protecting their reputations - the exceptions being John Cleland, for whom the distance of a couple of centuries since the original publication of 'Fanny Hill' provided protection enough, and Robert Desmond, an English bank clerk in Antwerp who failed to register his publisher's encouragement towards a pseudonym. One assumes that 'René Roques' is not the writer on Christian mysticism of this period, with no French originals for the works here translated to be traced; the young Christopher Logue conjured the exotic 'Count Palmiro Vicarion', American poet Philip Oxman the mildly-suggestive 'Thomas Peachum', but the most significant of the contemporary contributors was Scottish author Alexander Trocchi, whose 'Merlin' with Olympia had introduced Samuel Beckett to their list. Trocchi provides four of the volumes here: 'Helen and Desire' and its sequel, 'The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis', were written in slavish conformity to the Girodias formula; but 'Young Adam', under the same pseudonym of 'Frances Lengel', was an altogether more literary proposition - an existentialist tale in the manner of Camus's 'L'Étranger', in which the relationship between a Glaswegian bargehand, Joe Necchi, and a dead girl he finds in the canal is slowly brought to light. Whilst the other Lengel novels had been written in weeks, 'Young Adam' was the work of years; labour rewarded with the advice from Girodias that he would be glad to publish the work, as long as some more erotic episodes could be inserted - a diktat to which the author, presumably with some level of impecunious reluctance, obliged. Proper to its actual merits, the novel has gone on to have a longer life, including a trade edition with Heinemann and a film version in 2003, with subsequent versions reverting to Trocchi's original text - the legacy of Girodias's intervention seeming to remain only in the custard-flinging sex-scene, which, hinging on the protagonist's angry reaction to being berated as a failed writer, may have had more basis in truth than its absurdity would suggest. Trocchi's final contribution to the list was a more unusual and elaborate exercise in dissimulation: the publisher's father, Jack Kahane, had published via his Obelisk Press the four previous volumes of Irishman Frank Harris's ludicrously self-aggrandising account of his amatory and literary adventures - a relationship that had stopped short of a mooted fifth volume. After considerable effort and expense, Girodias had been able to establish the work's existence among the author's papers and extract it from his executors, but found it amounted only to a sheaf of notes. Uncowed, though likely a little enraged, he enlisted Trocchi to carry out a thorough impersonation of Harris's execrable idiosyncrasies, which he published as though it was the climactic volume of memoir that he had hoped to acquire - an exercise in parody through which Trocchi, as Girodias declared in his Preface to its subsequent publication as 'What Frank Harris Did Not Say', gives the author 'the dimension of a myth'. (Kearney 31-40).

Seller Inventory # 81991

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Atlantic Library, a complete run, comprising: 1) René Roques, Three Passionate Lovers. A novel, translated from the French by Peter Leroy. 2) Frances Lengel [pseud. for Alexander Trocchi], Helen and Desire. 3) René Roques, Ladies at Night. A novel, translated from the French by James O'Leary. 4) Count Palmiro Vicarion [pseud. for Christopher Logue], Lust. 5) John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill]. 6) Frances Lengel [pseud. for Alexander Trocchi], Young Adam. 7) Frances ...
• Publisher: The Atlantic Library by The Olympia Press
• Publication Date: 1954
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern First Edition