Obelisk Press

Every censored generation gets the publisher it needs. The English-speaking 1930s got Jack Kahane: a Manchester-born novelist with a taste for the avant-garde, a weakness for the risqué, and a crucial piece of legal arithmetic — books published in English in France answered to no British or American censor. Customs officers could seize them at the border, and did, constantly. But they could be printed, sold in Paris, and slipped into coat linings, and that was enough to build a press on.

Kahane founded Obelisk in 1929 after his own London publisher went under, going into business alongside Herbert Clarke, an English printer whose Imprimerie Vendôme at 338 rue Saint-Honoré did the actual work. There was never a shop: the address was a working print room on a street of expensive boutiques, and the books left it for coat linings rather than window displays. The business model was a two-sided ledger unique in publishing history. On one side: frankly commercial 'db's' — dirty books, Kahane's own cheerful term — many written by Kahane himself under the pen name Cecil Barr, beginning with Daffodil in 1931. On the other: literature no respectable house would touch. The naughty books paid the bills; the bills bought the gambles; and the gambles turned out to include some of the century's most important fiction.

The list tells the story. Obelisk reprinted The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel banned in Britain after a notorious 1928 obscenity trial. It published James Joyce when the big houses hesitated, James Hanley's suppressed Boy, Frank Harris's unprintable memoirs, Cyril Connolly's only novel, and the young Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book — which Durrell always said Obelisk alone would print whole. And in September 1934 it issued a first novel by an unknown, forty-two-year-old American who had been living hand to mouth in Paris: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, the book that would eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court and end literary censorship in America. Obelisk published five more Miller titles, including the rest of what became the Paris trilogy.

It was a family shop in the most literal sense: Kahane's wife Marcelle and their son Maurice drew and designed covers for the imprint. The son is a story of his own. During the Occupation he took his mother's maiden name — Girodias — to survive the war as a Jew in Paris, briefly revived Obelisk afterward (selling Miller by the crate to American G.I.s passing through on their way home), and in 1953 founded the Olympia Press, which ran his father's playbook for a new generation: Lolita, Beckett, Naked Lunch. The family firm, in two generations, published the banned masterpieces of both halves of the century.

Kahane himself did not live to see any vindication. He died on 3 September 1939 — within days of the war's outbreak — having just completed his own book, a memoir with the perfect title: Memoirs of a Booklegger. It is hard to improve on as an epitaph. He was a self-confessed peddler of naughty books who understood, earlier and more cheerfully than the great publishing houses, that the scandalous list and the essential list are usually the same list, ten years apart.