FORD, Charles Henri and Parker TYLER The Young and Evil. Paris: The Olympia Press.1960.
Small format 8vo., original green card covers, ruled and lettered in black and white; pp. [viii], 9-185, [vii]; title page with border in green; slight scuffing to edges and creasing along the spine; a clean, bright copy, just starting to pull away at the front gutter.
First Olympia Press edition, No. 80 in the Traveller’s Companion Series, printed in June1960 by Impr. Georges Frère, Tourcoing and priced 15 NF to the lower cover. The title was first published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press. Kearney reports that this edition was published
with a wrapper, but it was never seen by the bibliographer. The book is dedicated by Ford to ‘K. T. Y’ and by Tyler to ‘The most intimate guest’.
It was during the 1930s that Charles Henri Ford first became part of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. There, he met such figures as Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and Djuna Barnes, the latter with whom he began an affair. Later, the pair travelled to Tangiers, and Ford would
type up the manuscript of Barnes’ third novel, Nightwood, considered in itself to be somewhat of a milestone in the history of lesbian literature. Together with the American poet, writer and Film Critic Harrison Parker Tyler, Ford wrote The Young and Evil during his
early days in Paris, for which Stein would contribute the blurb. "The Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation", she wrote. Ford and Tyler later collaborated again in the 1940s, when they published the magazine View, devoted to the promotion of avant-garde and surrealist art.
The Young and Evil tells the story of a group of homosexual men, living, loving, drinking and partying in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1930s. Presenting a positive, uplifting and thoroughly unapologetic portrayal of gay relationships, it was subsequently banned from publication in both the US and UK, and almost 500 of the original 2500 copies in the first print run were destroyed by British customs, with Edith Sitwell reportedly burning her example, claiming that it was "entirely without soul, like a dead fish stinking in hell". It is
perhaps unsurprising that the book was later re-issued here, by the Olympia Press, themselves famous for printing and re-printing pornographic, erotic and banned literature.
This edition surprisingly scarce in commerce.
Kearney (p. 91)
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