Liverpool Library Press – The Outrageous Erotic Fiction Publisher

The visual guide to America’s most outrageous and salacious paperback publisher.

Erotic fiction found itself liberated by a series of obscenity trials in the 1960s, which slowly chipped away at the restrictions around the written word, with the high-profile trials of serious literature – Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Last Exit to Brooklyn – paving the way for less literary works. By the mid-1970s, even the British courts were forced to concede that there was little hope of ever getting a conviction against the written word (though the Manchester police would continue to raid Savoy Books for decades to come, and there have been infrequent attempts to set new legal precedents for what can and cannot be written). In the Sixties, the line between serious literature and porn was blurred by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, which published both side by side in the Travellers Companion series – so named because, although published in Paris, the books were in English and aimed squarely at tourists and other international travellers from countries where books like Henry Miller’s novels or The Naked Lunch were still outlawed.

Where Olympia led, others followed. The Liverpool Library Press, launched in 1967, was notable for following the Olympia style of plain, dark green covers, though it did allow for illustrations to be included in the form of line drawings that might often appear to be fairly innocent at first glance. The company was set up by an unidentified American with deep pockets and a taste for the more outré aspects of sexuality, and despite the name – possibly inspired by the popularity of the British city thanks to the Beatles – had a Scandinavian address – Sweden and Denmark then seen as hotbeds of sexual freedom, of course. To confuse the issue further, the business was initially based in Majorca, where – for vague tax reasons – the publisher would insist on most of his writers relocating to while they wrote their books. Apparently, it was worth the effort for writers, with Liverpool Library Press paying $1200 a book – very good money back then. Because of this, the publisher attracted some serious talent, working – of course – under pseudonyms. Many used the money to help finance their more respectable, but less popular, writing careers. Among the Liverpool Library Press authors was Edward D. Wood Jr.

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