Maurice Girodias was the most daring avant-garde publisher in English of the post-war era. His Paris-based Olympia Press took on Samuel Beckett at a time when no British publisher wanted him, Vladimir Nabokov when Lolita was considered unprintable, William Burroughs when The Naked Lunch was regarded as obscenely incomprehensible, The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy, as well as translations of risqué works by Jean Cocteau and other French authors.

Olympia flourished for a dozen or more years from 1951. Its best known list, the Traveller’s Companion Series, specialised in supplying titles such as The Wisdom of the Lash and Bottoms Up to British tourists, American GIs and any other ‘traveller’ in search of cheap Left Bank company in the form of an erotic tale. The convenient narrative holds that Girodias issued the dirty books (DBs, as they were known to the British and American men and women who produced them) in order to subsidise the ‘literature’ – which is how Barry Reay and Nina Attwood refer to his more serious material in Dirty Books, their study of porno production before and after the second world war. But the opposite is surely the case. The extravagant trash that spurted from the pens of some otherwise talented writers owes its continued existence to the link with Olympia’s catalogue of once untouchable modern classics.

Olympia’s dirty books included Lust by Count Palmiro Vicarion, the sole effort by the English poet Christopher Logue, later to represent parts of Homer’s Iliad in startlingly modern form. Logue’s friend and fellow expatriate Alexander Trocchi was among Olympia’s most prolific authors, coming up with Thongs by Carmencita de las Lunas, a murky tale of whipping and branding in, of all places, the Gorbals of Glasgow, and the more sensitive Helen and Desire,under his customary pseudonym Frances Lengel. When the Paris morality police seized Helen and Desire, Girodias contacted his printer and had a new cover printed with Desire and Helen on the front. It was back in the shops before you could say Candy – another banned title, this one by Terry Southern, which reappeared after a police raid as Lollipop.

Olympia was a family business. Girodias inherited his first book, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, from his Mancunian father Jack Kahane, who died in 1939 on the day war broke out. Reay and Attwood’s chapter on Kahane’s Obelisk Press (also Paris-based; Girodias took his mother’s non-Jewish-sounding name during the Occupation) is one of the best. The quality list Kahane assembled in the decade before his death was similar in kind to that of his son later: Lawrence Durrell, James Hanley, Anaïs Nin and, of course, Miller. Populist ballast was provided by mildly salacious titles such as Lady, Take Heed! and Bright Pink Youth, many of which were written under pseudonyms by Kahane himself.

Reay and Attwood devote a chapter to the early porn-on-demand writings of Nin and Miller, who responded to the demands of collectors of erotica. The pair collaborated on the tales to such an extent that at times neither could recall who wrote what. Both, however, distinguished the stuff from what they regarded as literary work. Trocchi, the future junkie and author of Cain’s Book, went the other way. Having written a study of Scottish existential alienation, Young Adam (1954), he yielded to Girodias’s persistent demand for ‘more sex’ and set about making his good book bad. The justification was unchanging: another month’s rent – Girodias paid for the DBs in instalments – another bowl of onion soup in Les Halles and another bottle on the table to help conjure the next chapter into being.

It wasn’t all lascivious larks. In 1953, Trocchi and Logue, along with the future Grove Press editor Richard Seaver and others, started a high-minded magazine called Merlin, and persuaded Girodias to publish it – a rival of sorts to the neighbouring Paris Review. Beckett called them ‘the Merlin juveniles’. They acquired Watt – Beckett’s last novel to be written originally in English – and it became the lead title in Collection Merlin, Olympia’s latest list. The catalogue soon embraced Logue’s first book of poems, Beckett’s Molly, translated by him with one of the Merlin team, and an early outing for Jean Genet in English.

Girodias respected his better titles, but their authors did not always care for him. Beckett hadn’t a single word to say when they met in a bookshop, ‘neither hello nor goodbye’. Nabokov detested him, not least because Girodias intended to call his Paris nightclub ‘Chez Lolita’, funded by profits from the novel. Donleavy’s hatred went even deeper, eventually bringing about the publisher’s downfall. He obtained the company name at a bankruptcy auction, where Girodias had expected to buy it back himself.

It is an odd complaint to make about a book called Dirty Books, but Reay and Attwood would have enriched their account of mid-century repression and censorship had they reduced the amount of pummelling, plunging, surging, shuddering and melting, and broadened the social context. The Merlin crowd were having fun. Girodias helped to pay for it. To some, he was a lovable rogue. To others, just a rogue. But he was a one-off, and he deserves credit for his tenacious opposition to the literary cancel culture of the time.