Manchester-born novelist Kahane began the Obelisk Press after his publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. Going into partnership with a printer — Herbert Clarke, owner of Imprimerie Vendôme[1] — Kahane, as "Cecil Barr", published his next novel Daffodil under his own imprint in 1931. A writer and publisher of "db's" ("dirty books"), Kahane mixed serious work with smut in his list; he has been described as "a quite bizarre blend of ultra-sophisticated, avant-garde literary entrepreneur and, by the standards of his time, pornographer."[2] He was able to take advantage of the fact that books published in France in English were not subject to the kind of censorship practised in Britain at the time. However, they were still subject to confiscation by British and US customs officers.
Kahane's 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 II, 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 (who took his mother's birth name, Girodias, 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 and he founded the Olympia Press in 1953.
