Lolita

1955. Paris: The Olympia Press, 1955.

2 vols. 8vo, 188, 223pp. Original green printed wrappers, backstrips slightly worn, some edge-wear to the joints, and with a small portion of the lower left corner of the upper wrapper of vol.1 sympathetically repaired. New quarter green morocco clamshell box lettered in gilt. A very good copy of this very fragile paperback.

§ First edition, first issue with the original printed price of 900 francs untouched. This acclaimed and infamous novel was published in France following its rejection by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus and Doubleday. Olympia Press, headed by (truncated) Maurice Girodias, agreed to publish the book with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. It divided opinion, with Graham Greene calling it one of the three best books of 1955, while John Gordon of the Sunday Express called it "the filthiest book I have ever read." Shortly after, British Customs officers were instructed to sieze all copies in the United Kingdom, and it was banned in France for two years. It was eventually published in the UK in 1959 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kearney, Private Case, 16. Juliar, Bibliography of Nabokov, A28.1.1. (Inventory #: 125561)