A Publisher's Paradise: Expatirate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

4. Charles Carrington’s Books from Abroad, Circa 1895–1921

91 chapter 4 / Charles Carrington’s Books from Abroad, circa 1895–1921 Charles Carrington’s extraordinary life as an expatriate, unearthed in the last chapter, informed his great entrepreneurial venture as a Paris-based publisher-bookseller. Sometime around 1895, when he immigrated to Paris, he set up his unique publishing business that specialized in sex books from abroad, which he sometimes advertised as Paris editions. That very same year the British government began monitoring his activities, and that of the other lesser dealers who traded for him and piggybacked on his business. He published 85 percent of his list of roughly three hundred books between 1895 and 1907 when he was in Paris, but he also continued to publish during his exile in Brussels (1907–c. 1912) as well as after his return to Paris (c. 1912–1921).1 These publications ranged widely from annotated editions of semischolarly studies on sexology, anthropology, and history, to translations of the ancient classics, Orientalist sex manuals, and French novels, to diverse genres of sadomasochistic and pornographic fiction. With this odd mix of sex, erudition, and exoticism, Carrington operated in an intercultural carrefour reliant chapter 4 92 on translations and outlying production and distribution channels. Opinion on him, his business, and his books varied tremendously over his career: The New York Times, c. 1902: Mr. Charles Carrington, the well-known international publisher of 13 Faubourg Montmartre, Paris . . . The Liverpool Mercury, 1904: There is invariably an air of distinction about the publications of Mr. Carrington, very appreciable to the amateur of fine books, but very difficult precisely to describe. The Lancet, 1897: MR. CHARLES CARRINGTON is a person who describes himself as a “publisher of medical folk-lore and scientific works.” We do not know in which category he would place a book which he has had the insolence to forward for us for review, bearing the innocent title of “Untrodden Fields of Anthropology.” . . .The book, said to be written by a French army surgeon, is solely a record, and a very badly written record, of garbage from the sewers of human nature. It has no scientific importance whatever. It is of no interest to a student of human nature or of natural history.We shall be happy to supply the Paris police with Mr. Carrington’s address and to hand over the book with its accompanying prospectus to Her Majesty’s Postmaster-General, so that he may, if he will, take steps to stay the dissemination of such abominations by the agency of his department. Senator René Bérenger to the Procureur de la République, 1898: I have received from the NationalVigilance Association of London, and hereby forward to you, a printed catalogue of obscene books whose licentiousness and crudeness surpass anything our society has ever seen. . . . It was sent by C. Carrington’s publishing house which, as we have already informed you, has been sending licentious brochures to England.2 Carrington’s “difficult to describe” books generated extreme reactions and affective tensions. His supporters found them distinctive , but his enemies thought them garbage. There were other continental booksellers and publishers who dealt in “dirty” English books during these years, but none rivaled Carrington in output, prominence, or notoriety. Carrington garnered this attention, in part, because he did not restrict his sex books to coterie markets but advertised them in all kinds of venues, from two-penny weeklies to highbrow medical journals.The controversial publishing careers of other independent British publisher-booksellers of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Henry Vizetelly, John Lane, and Leonard Smithers, have been comprehensively charted and studied, but Carrington’s Charles Carrington’s Books from Abroad 93 has not despite his productivity and longevity.3 The critical tendency has been to dismiss Carrington as an opportunist pornographer or to overlook him as an historical footnote.A lack of scholarly rigor around his biography and his publications underscores this bias, notwithstanding his own role in obscuring this history. Paul Douglas, however, has recently described him as “a perceptive and successful publisher, marketer and seller of books” and “forerunner of 20th-century publishers who rebelled against a prevailing censorship of any literature that had sexual content deemed to be offensive to the general public.”4 I too want to consider Carrington’s controversial publishing business in Paris editions in this light, as the innovation of an eccentric and brilliant Anglo-Jew expatriate who, while looking to reinvent himself...