One of the most storied moments in the history of underground fiction came when Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press visited the staff of Merlin, a fledgling literary journal in Paris. The message he brought, that everyone could make money if they only published dirty books, struck a chord with Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue and others on the staff. In 1954, Trocchi published his first "db" with Olympia, Young Adam. under the pseudonym "Francis Lengel." An accidental classic, it's an existential thriller set on a barge travelling along the canalways between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The plot revolves around the discovery of the corpse of a young woman found floating in the canal. As tensions develop between the narrator of the story and the couple with whom he shares the the barge, the reader is slowly sucked into the disturbed psyche of Trocchi's rootless anti-hero. And, of course, there's lots of sex.