Paperback. Green cover with black title.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list 

No 105 of the Traveller’s Companion Series

By Aubrey Beardsley completed by John Classco

First published UK edition. Under the Hill is an unfinished erotic novel by Aubrey Beardsley, based on the legend of Tannhäuser. The first parts of it were published in The Savoy and later issued in book form by Leonard Smithers. In 1907, the original manuscript was published and entitled The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser.

A version completed by John Glassco was published in 1959 by Olympia Press, in a limited run of 3,000 copies. This completed version was also later introduced into the Olympia Press/New English Library “Traveller’s Companion Series” in 1966.

Soft cover. Condition: Near Fine. 1st UK Edition. Tight binding, no loose pages (many of these books fell to pieces). First Edition thus – it was famously published by the Olympia Press in Paris because it was banned elsewhere, and this edition follows the green livery of that original issue. Gorgeous decadent Beardsley prose and drawings; this was his version of the story of Tannhauser, and the manuscript was worked over for two years and left incomplete at Beardsley’s death in 1898.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley’s contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.

John Glassco was a prominent Canadian poet, translator, and novelist born in Montreal in 1909. He attended McGill University briefly before moving to Paris in 1928, where he immersed himself in a community of expatriate writers.

Warning: This book was part of the erotic library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG, along with medical friends and family involved in Freudian research. Sexual instincts or drives have deeply hidden roots in the unconscious mind. Instincts act by giving vitality and enthusiasm to the mind through meaning and purpose. The range of instincts is in great numbers. Freud expressed them in two categories. One is Eros, the self-preserving life instinct containing all erotic pleasures. While Eros is used for basic survival, the living instinct alone cannot explain all behavior, according to Freud. In contrast, Thanatos is the death instinct. It is full of self-destruction of sexual energy and our unconscious desire to die. The main part of human behavior and actions is tied back to sexual drives. Since birth, the existence of sexual drives can be recognized as one of the most important incentives of life. The enclosed book was part of this research. A photograph is enclosed, should you seek further details please contact Martin Frost on martin.frost@gmail.com 

Foremost amongst erotic books collected by Jack Arnold Lang are those published in France by the Olympia Press. The Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for issuing the first printed edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

In its heyday during the mid-fifties Olympia Press specialized in books which could not be published (without legal action) in the English-speaking world. Early on, Girodias relied on the permissive attitudes of the French to publish sexually explicit books in both French and English. In the late 1950s,the French authorities began to ban and seize the press’s books.

A total of 94 Olympia Press publications were promoted and packaged as “Traveller’s Companion” books, usually with simple text-only covers, and each edition in the series was numbered. The “Ophelia Press” line of erotica was far larger, using the same design, but pink covers instead of green.

Olympia Press was the first publisher willing to print William S. Burroughs’s avant-garde, sexually explicit Naked Lunch, which soon became famous. Other notable works included J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; Samuel Beckett’s French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Henry Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Nexus and Plexus; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille; Story of O by Pauline Réage; Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy; Alex Austin’s The Blue Guitar and Eleanore; and a critical book on Scientology, Inside Scientology/Dianetics by Robert Kaufman. The South African poet Sinclair Beiles was an editor at the publisher. Other authors included Alexander Trocchi, Iris Owens (Harriet Daimler) and John Stevenson (Marcus Van Heller).

Girodias had troubled dealings with his authors including copyright issues. Nabokov was dissatisfied with the copyediting, assignment of copyright and the press’s literary reputation. The press engaged in a long-running dispute over the rights to The Ginger Man ended with Donleavy’s wife Mary buying out Girodias at what was intended to be a closed auction. Forced to leave France in 1963, Girodias briefly reestablished Olympia Press in New York in the 1960s, and in London in the early 1970s.

Grove Press in the U.S. would later print The Olympia Reader, a best-selling anthology containing material from some of Olympia’s most popular works, including material by Burroughs, Miller, Trocchi and others. Another well-known collection was The Best of Olympia, first published by the Olympia Press in 1963 and reprinted by New English Library in 1966.

Other incarnations of the company, some with Girodias’ support, emerged in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Olympia Press has been re-established and is currently operating out of Washington, London, and Frankfurt.