Jack Kahane (20 July 1887, in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

– 2 September 1939, in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

) was a writer and publisher who founded the

Obelisk Press Obelisk Press was an English-language press based in Paris, founded by British publisher Jack Kahane in 1929. Manchester-born novelist Kahane began the Obelisk Press after his publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. Going into partnership with ...

in Paris in 1929. He was the son of Selig and Susy Kahane, both immigrants from Romania. Kahane, a novelist, began the Obelisk Press after his publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. Going into partnership with a printer — Herbert Clarke, owner of Imprimerie Vendôme — Kahane published his next novel ''Daffodil'' under his own imprint, and under one of several pseudonyms he used, Cecil Barr. A publisher of "dbs" ("dirty books"), Kahane mixed serious work with smut in his list; he was able to take advantage of a legal hiatus whereby English-language books published in France were not subject there to the censorship otherwise effectively practised in the UK and elsewhere, though they remained potentially subject to confiscation when they were imported into English-speaking countries. The Obelisk Press published

Henry Miller Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical ref ...

's ''

Tropic of Cancer The Tropic of Cancer, which is also referred to as the Northern Tropic, is the most northerly circle of latitude on Earth at which the Sun can be directly overhead. This occurs on the June solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted tow ...

'' and other works that other publishers would not touch for fear of prosecution, among which were '' Lady Chatterley's Lover'', James Hanley's ''

Boy A boy is a young male human. The term is commonly used for a child or an adolescent. When a male human reaches adulthood, he is described as a man. Definition, etymology, and use According to the ''Merriam-Webster Dictionary'', a boy is ...

''John Fordham, ''James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class''. University of Wales Press, 2002, p. 146 and fn 57, p. 270. See also Neil Pearson, ''Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press'' (2008), A-37(c) and some of

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

's books. Jack Kahane was the father of

Maurice Girodias Maurice Girodias (12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990) was a French publisher who founded the Olympia Press, specialising in risqué books, censored in Britain and America, that were permitted in France in English-language versions only. It evol ...

, who created the

Olympia Press Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is b ...

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kahane, Jack 1887 births 1939 deaths English Jews English writers English publishers (people) English people of Romanian-Jewish descent French people of Romanian-Jewish descent English pornographers British expatriates in France 20th-century English male writers 20th-century English businesspeople

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