1980 "First Edition" stated on copyright page; Crown Publishers, New York; hardbound; very good condition with unmarked pages except for previous owner's initials inside (see pic); dust jacket good with minor edge wear.
 
Kirkus review -
Ouf, one volume down, at least one more to go, of this pleasant but awfully garrulous tale. Girodias, of course, is a pornographer and the son of a pornographer (an English Jew named Jack Kahane), but both father and son had a hand in some important artistic ventures. Kahane's Obelisk Press published Henry Miller, Anas Nin, and Lawrence Durrell, while Girodias' Olympia Press published Kazantzakis, Nabokov, and J. P. Donleavy. Father and son also had literary pretensions: Kahane churned out dirty novels for English-speaking tourists in Paris and the mail order business, and now Girodias has produced this account, at times quite diverting, of his first 20 years or so. Fans of The Olympia Reader, however, ought to be warned that it takes almost the entire book for the hero to lose his virginity, and the sex, while spectacular, is spread fairly thin. Girodias, in fact, has a lot of different things to talk about: his grandparents' life on a ranch in Argentina, tumultuous school days at the Collge de Meaux (with a few scenes right out of Zro de Conduite), expulsion from a Paris lyce for impromptu arson, involvement with a theosophical ashram, running away to India (he barely made Italy), attempted suicide, his father's death on the eve of the Nazi occupation, nervous moments as a half-Jew in Paris interrogated by the Gestapo, etc. Girodias occasionally speculates on history or politics or religion, but his efforts are unimpressive. He's at his best when rattling lyrically away about his often zany adventures, erotic and otherwise. (As a lover he can be very winning--gentle, gallant, and explosively enthusiastic.) Some of the earnest adolescent conversations he reports verbatim threaten to bury the story, but it pulls through. A lively show that goes on a bit too long.