In 1965 a nominally Paris-based publisher, Edition Or-Mondial, started to publish a series in German called ‘Meisterwerke der erotischen Literatur’ (Masterworks of Erotic Literature). Five years later, when publication ceased, twelve numbered volumes had been published.

Seven of the series were illustrated, and five of those by an artist credited as Maurice Charroux. The pen and ink illustrations are competent and intelligent, very much of their time, and the quality improves perceptibly from Aloisia Segaea in 1965 onwards.

We can be sure that ‘Maurice Charroux’ is a pseudonym, as there is no record of any artist of that name. We have not been able to identify any particular illustrator working on similar material in the late 1960s, though it has been suggested that ‘Maurice Charroux’ is a pseudonym of the Dutch illustrator Georges (sometimes George) Laurent Mazure, who together with his better-known brother Alfred (who created the popular comic strip Dick Bos), worked on a variety of comics from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Georges Mazure also created his own newspaper strip about a sexy female criminologist called Myra van Dijk, whose adventures he drew for Het Vrije Volk, and another erotic heroine, Jacqueline, for several Dutch regional papers. Georges Mazure spent the final years of his life in France, and in 1978 he created the Sahara strip for Spirou, the Belgian magazine for which he had previously drawn Coup au coeur (Heartbreak) in 1968; this would place him in the francophone world at just the right time for the Or-Mondial commissions.

Apart from the similarity in subject matter and the Paris residency coincidence, however, we have no direct evidence that ‘Charroux’ and Mazure are the same artist. Georges Mazure’s complete archive is held in the Allard Pierson Collection at the University of Amsterdam, donated by his daughter Muriël in 2011, containing not only hundreds of illustrations and complete comics, but also correspondence and financial records relating to his work – maybe that archive holds the vital clue!

Similar artists

Zevi Blum – American etcher and illustrator of erotic literary classics.
John Boyce – American etcher and illustrator of Anaïs Nin’s Aphrodisiac.
Philippe Cavell – French erotic bande-dessinée artist of Sade and Fanny Hill adaptations.
Guido Crepax – Italian adult-comics pioneer of literary-erotic adaptations from the 1960s.
Leone Frollo – Italian adult-comics artist of refined figurative-erotic work.
Georges Pichard – French pioneer of adult-comics adaptations of erotic literary classics.