The combination of quality writing, ink artwork throughout, and great timing made LLP a mega-success. Not a bad rate considering (1) that equates to about $8,000 in today’s dollars and (2) an author could easily crank one of these books out every week. In 1969, the going rate was $1,200 per novel. One of the reasons LLP’s writing was a cut-above other sleaze publications was because it payed a decent wage.

The address likely served two purposes: (1) to impede legal action toward LLP (a stateside address was a lot easier to prosecute than a possibly fictitious address buried in Denmark, and (2) the association with Scandinavia in the late sixties/early seventies was synonymous with sexual freedom an address in Copenhagen was a definite “plus” for adult book consumers. … Which is interesting, because LLP authors could write about some monumentally warped sleaze. LLP works were literary masterpieces compared to the standard porn paperback. However, they were still miles ahead of the the brainless, artless trash produced by your average sleaze publication. Certainly no one at LLP came anywhere remotely close to the caliber of Nabokov, Miller, or Burroughs. Nothing garish, nothing shocking on the front… the naughty business was between the covers, not on the covers.Īnother commonality between Olympia and LLP was the quality of writing. Hence the name “Traveler’s Companion”.Īnd the link to the Liverpool Library Press – their covers were plane green. So, tourists from the U.S., visiting Paris, could purchase a copy of a work that would be illegal to sell back in the States.

but (and, here’s the rub) they were printed in English. Olympia press more-or-less stuck to works that would get a bookseller fined or jailed in the United States so, they were released in the more sexually liberated France…. This series, from the 1950s, published such works as Sextet by Henry Miller, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Story of O by Pauline Réage. And unlike other publishers which relied on lurid and garish covers to sell their books (much like the pulp magazines of yore), LLP chose a more subtle style – an almost “classy” look inspired by the Olympia Press’ Traveler’s Companion series.

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