Obelisk : a history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press

Neal Pearson

"Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press tells the story of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary publishing enterprises. Censor-bating and provocative, a publisher of 'dirty books' as well as those of the literary elite, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press was the first publisher of the early work of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin, and its roster of authors also included James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington and Cyril Connolly. Kahane subsidised his highbrow literary endeavours by pumping out cheap erotica, trash fiction produced by long-forgotten eccentrics like N. Reynolds Packard, the Rome correspondent of the New York Daily News and self-styled 'Marco Polo of sex'. Kahane's business model was simple: any book banned in the UK or US could be published in Paris - and at a profit." "Obelisk includes a complete bibliography of Obelisk titles, mini-biographies of its authors, and also features the first extensive biographical essay on Jack Kahane himself. This volume - part cultural history, part reference book - offers a fascinating insight into the poetic illusions and also the commercial realities that drove literary life in 1930s Paris."--[Jacket].