New hand made Sea Urchin pamphlet:
Alexander Trocchi – White Thighs (1992 reprint)
Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi co-founded and edited the English literary magazine Merlin in Paris from 1952 to 1954. After Merlin had come to an end he got addicted to heroin and wrote a string of pornographic books for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press to sustain himself and feed his addiction. White Thighs is one of those pornographic novels. The book was published under the pseudonym Frances Lengel in 1955.
Trocchi’s restless existence took him from Glasgow, where he was born in 1925, first to Paris and from there to New Mexico, New York, Montreal, California and London. Connected to both the Beats in the US and the Lettrists in France, he formed one of the early links between the Beat Generation and the European avant-garde. In New York, where he worked on a stone scow on the Hudson River to make a living, he wrote his largely autobiographical Cain’s Book, which was banned in the UK in 1964 for the junky lifestyle it portrays. Candid descriptions of the existential bleakness of junky life combined with Trocchi’s refined writing style make the book a classic of post-war literature.
Trocchi moved to London in 1962 and stayed there until his death in 1984. He never managed to finish another novel but continued to publish works under the cloak of his Project Sigma, which was related to Situationist International. The best-known of these works is the 1963 essay A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a million Minds, which – via Simon Vinkenoog – influenced Provo in Amsterdam.
The condition of this copy of Masquerade Book’s 1992 reprint of White Thighs is very good, with some wear on the cover and some yellowing of the pages. Order now →