Obelisk Press

Obelisk Press was an English language press based in Paris, France, which was founded by Jack Kahane in 1929.

Kahane, a novelist, began the Obelisk Press after his publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. Going into partnership with a printer, Kahane, as Cecil Barr, published his next novel Daffodil under his own imprint. A writer and publisher of 'db's ("dirty books"), Kahane mixed serious work with smut in his list; he was able to take advantage of a legal loop-hole whereby books published in France in English were not subject to the censorship otherwise practised^[where?] at the time, but were still subject to confiscation when importation^[where?] was attempted.

Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; Obelisk published five more books by Miller, as well as Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero (1930), Anaïs Nin's Winter of Artifice (1939), Cyril Connolly's first book and only novel, The Rock Pool (1936), James Joyce's Haveth Childers Everywhere and Pomes Penyeach (1932), Frank Harris's My Life and Loves (1934) and Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book (1938), Squadron 95 by war hero Harold Buckley, James Hanley's Boy (1935) and Limericks by Norman Douglas. He reprinted Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which had been banned in Britain in 1928. Kahane published many forgotten authors like Norah James, Canadian poet Lawrence Dakin or Nadejda de Bragança. His wife Marcelle and their son Maurice (later known as Maurice Girodias) worked as cover illustrators for the imprint.

Kahane died within days of the outbreak of World War Two, having just finished his final book, on 3 September 1939. This book, Memoirs of a Booklegger, marked the end of Obelisk for several years, until his son (Girodias took his mother's birth name during the war to evade detection as a Jew) briefly revived it in the years following the war.

Selling in large quantities to the American G.I.s passing through Paris on their return home, Miller's best-known works were republished alongside other English language books such as Memoirs of Fanny Hill. Girodias also published a few important works in French including George Bataille's literary review Critique and Nikos Kazantzakis's Alexis Zorbas (1947). Girodias largely abandoned the Obelisk Press name when he discovered that new titles under the name would not sell.

External links

• Campbell, James (December 5, 2007). "Sauce and genius, published in Paris". The Times Literary Supplement. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3003878.ece. 
• Pearson, Neil (2007). Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press. Liverpool University Press. 

References