Obelisk Press

Deux publications (en anglais) sur Jack Kahane et ses maisons d'éditions (Obelisk Press, Paris Olympia Press) d'ouvrages pornographiques, que Jean-François Le Deist nous avait fait découvrir dans un n° de Maragogype, si ma mémoire est bonne.

Obelisk. A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press

Neil Pearson

'Obelisk, in Pearson's skilled hands, is an entertaining and immensely readable book... full of good colour illustrations and excellent value for money.'
Tom Rosenthal, The Independent on Sunday

'Pearson is … as adroit a writer as he is watchable an actor. Everyone with an interest in literary history will enjoy Pearson's narrative.’
Nicholas Clee, The Guardian

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-baiting 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 Anaïs 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 lively and engaging 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. Obelisk is a publishing event not to be missed by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century literary lives and letters.

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http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3772

The Paris Olympia Press

Patrick Kearney

Edited by Angus Carroll

The successor to the notorious Obelisk Press run by Jack Kahane, the Paris Olympia Press, founded by Kahane's son Maurice Girodias, picked up where its predecessor finished. On one hand the 'dirty books' grew even dirtier but on the other Giriodas’s avant-garde literary endeavours soon outstripped those of his father: William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy are among the novels first published by the Paris Olympia Press. Giriodas’s publishing house drew acclaim and controversy for its literary contributions during the 'golden age of erotica', a time when starving artists, intellectuals, academics and journalists wrote erotic fiction under the cover of pseudonyms to pay the bills. In The Paris Olympia Press, renowned bibliographer Patrick Kearney has compiled a detailed account of the Press’s publishing activities, including biographical sketches of its authors, an introduction to the Press’s literary achievements, and a complete bibliography of works published. An extensive illustrated study, The Paris Olympia Press catalogues and comments on the early work of some of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

For further information or to order this book please click link below

http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3773