(VENUS) FREEWAY PRESS - BookScans

Girodias is the kind of person about whom many apocryphal stories circulate. One such is the story, 1
that the distribution of President Kissinger was suppressed when the entire print run disappeared from
the distributor's warehouse. However, a news item in Publishers Weekly 2 reported that Kable refused
to distribute the book and that Girodias had distributed it himself, selling 70,000 copies, which may be
an exaggeration in the other direction. In my experience it is no harder to find than any of the other
non-porn titles.
Of the 56 identified books, 26 were new, 30 were reprints and 1 a presumed re-issue. 21 were porn,
including 14 re-issues of old Olympia novels. Genre fiction included 8 adventure novels, 2 westerns, 6
books that qualify as mystery or espionage, and one gothic. There were 4 science fiction novels;
however, the 7 adventure novels, 3 of the espionage novels and the one gothic also qualify as science
fiction to a greater or lesser extent. One novel is too random to categorize. The 14 non-fiction books
fall into 3 main groups: 2 biographies, 7 occult, and 3 sex books, with only one title falling outside those
categories. There were no anthologies and only one collection, so I have sub-listed the contents in the
author Index and eschewed a separate contents index.
Freeway Press was pretty good about crediting the cover artists, even for the photographic covers.
Unfortunately, secondary sources rarely repeat these credits and too few books have been seen to be
comprehensive in this regard. 28 of the 56 covers appear in the Bookscans database; scans of 7 others
were seen elsewhere.
1 probably started by Marco Vassi, as quoted by Patrick Kearney.
2 August 26, 1974 issue.
2