Blue Moon Erotic Reader

by Barney Rosset

Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset's discovery of a treasure trove of suppressed 19th-century erotica -- including the notorious My Secret Life and gems like Romance of Lust -- inspired him to start a new line, Blue Moon, to reprint these and other early classics and publish new works in the same literate but sexually charged style. Blue Moon Reader puts this fascinating byway of publishing history in context with an essay by Rosset and a detailed portrait of infamous Paris publisher Charles Carrington. The book's rich tableaux of sexual excess, sampled from works that span the Victorian era to the Jazz Age to today, maintain their power to titillate, shock, and amuse.

358 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 1999

About the author

Barney Rosset was born in 1922 in Chicago to a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. He was briefly married to the Abstract Expressionist American painter Joan Mitchell. He bought Grove Press in 1951, and sold it to the Getty family in 1985. He died in 2012.