Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press, [1955].
First Edition, first issue.
Two octavo volumes. 188; 223 pp. Original printed wraps. Volume one has some minor browning and wear. Volume two is in almost perfect condition save a tiny chip to top back panel and bottom of the spine. “Francs: 900” printed on lower right back panels of both volumes (without the later ink stamp cancelling or raising the price). A desirable set.
First Edition, first issue. From an interview with Nabokov by the BBC in 1972: “Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book...she was born a long, long time ago...the first little throb of Lolita went through me in Paris in 1939...” Because of the strict censorship laws in place in all English-speaking countries at the time, it was only published sixteen years later, when the provocative publisher and founder of the Olympia Press Maurice Girodias did so as an act meant to rile the French authorities. The first printing of Lolita in two soft-cover volumes had a run of approximately 5,000; surviving copies of the correct first issue in collectable condition are rare. Olympia Press published many controversial novels of the time including J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; Samuel Beckett’s The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable; Pauline Réage’s Story of O and William S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch.
“Nevertheless Mr. Girodias (Olympia Press) kept urging me to join him in his campaign against French censorship. ‘Our interests are identical,’ he wrote; but they were not. He wanted me to defend Lolita, but I did not see how my book could be treated separately from his list of twenty or so lewd books. I did not want to defend even Lolita. He repeats in his article one of his favorite arguments that without him Lolita would have never been published.” -Nabokov
ID:
3057
$
5,000