A Publisher's Paradise

“I never realized how much I owe to the long dead porno kings of Paris. It wasn’t so much pinstriped publishers in New York or London or their well-compensated lawyers that secured for us the freedom to read. A good deal of the credit goes to seedy characters in English-speaking corners of Paris in the late 19th and early and mid-20th centuries… . Anyone interested in the history of publishing, books in general, and the fight for freedom of expression should read this book.”–Medium

“Consistent with the research methods of historical materialist Walter Benjamin, Colligan’s ‘retrieval’ of the past draws on the kind of data that can easily be lost from view: anonymous texts, incomplete records, underexposed literary artefacts, unfrequented archival files. Judiciously speculative, analytically rich, and never dull, her study inveigles the reader into areas of the once-banned literary output that put Paris in the vanguard of press freedoms eventually widely espoused by the United Kingdom and the United States… . A major addition to extant literature on publishing history and France’s seminal role in supporting controversial and marginal literary works from abroad.”–French Studies

“These days the forbidden is so accessible and so profitable and the avant-garde so commercialized that they go together like anything else online or at the mall. A century ago, forbidden meant forbidden… . [In A Publisher’s Paradise Colligan exposes] links visible in retrospect.”–Essays in Criticism

”[A] fascinating read… . Colligan’s careful research into the business behind these ‘sex books’ complicates any simple understanding of taste or of the ways national borders defined the business of literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.“–SHARP News

“With creative researching techniques, wit, and skill, Colligan brings to life the little known, understudied world of booklegging and book laundering, based in the French capital, but central to the development of Anglo-American modernist writing at large. A Publisher’s Paradise makes a significant scholarly contribution by taking ‘dirty books’ seriously and showing their significance to larger political and cultural conflicts, and by connecting dots that others have not connected.”–Brooke Blower, author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars

Colette Colligan is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University and author of The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture.