When an excerpt from John de St. Jorre's Venus Bound, unmasking the pseudonymous author of Story of O, appeared in The New Yorker - thus solving a forty-year-old literary mystery - it made worldwide news. In its entirety, Venus Bound recounts the astonishing but true story of the flamboyant rogue publisher Maurice Girodias, whose Paris-based Olympia Press gave birth to a curious mixture of raffish pornography and some of the most significant fiction of the twentieth century.

Dubbed "the Prince of Porn" and "the Lenin of the Sexual Revolution," Girodias helped breach the barriers of literary censorship in Britain and the United States.

His father was Jack Kahane, an Edwardian dandy who capped his life by publishing Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anais Nin. Girodias (he changed his name to elude the Nazis in occupied France) carried the family tradition to new heights - and depths. In shabby postwar Paris, he recruited a lively crew of starving but talented American and British writers to pump out the porn that financed, among other things, Olympia's literary list.

Deftly navigating between the French vice squad and financial disaster, Girodias and his writers set off on a memorable voyage through seedy back-street offices, glittering parties, international law courts, and one another's beds.

The result was such mortal works as White Thighs, The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, and There's a Whip in My Valise. But Girodias also published some bestselling - and enduring - novels, notably The Ginger Man, Candy, Lolita, Naked Lunch, and Story of O, as well as books by Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller.