Item #6862 Candy [first three editions; American samizdat]. Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg.
Candy [first three editions; American samizdat]
Candy [first three editions; American samizdat]

Candy [first three editions; American samizdat]

Paris: The Olympia Press, [1958-1962]. Three perfect bound volumes in green wraps, each 4 1⁄2 x 7 in. Offset. Each 189 pp. All very good to near fine; foxing to text block and endpapers of 2nd edition of Lollipop, along with previous bookseller stamp to front fly paper. Item #6862

The first edition of Candy by Maxwell Kenton, joint pseudonym of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, who co-authored this highly sexual satiric riff on Voltaire’s Candide. The novel was banned in France a year after its release; Olympia Press decided to reprint the contents under a different name, Lollipop, and continue distributing it clandestinely. In 2006, Playboy Magazine named it one of the “25 sexiest novels ever written,” taking the heroine’s misadventures for “a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians.”

Later in life co-author Mason Hoffenberg said about the writing, “you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.”

This example includes first edition examples of both Candy and its samizdat reprint Lollipop, as well as the 1962 reprinting of the latter, thus encompassing the novel’s publication history and clever circumvention of state censorship.

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