Obelisk Innards

Further to my earlier post about Neil Pearson's history of Obelisk Press and its creator, Jack Kahane, here are some of the book covers featured within that excellent volume. Aplogies for the less-than-perfect photographs, buyt if you want a better look, you have no excuse for not buying the book. Click on the pictures for more detail.


Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, and a wildly inappropriate (yet cool) cover for James Hanley's Boy.





Cecil Barr was a psuedonym for Jack Kahane himself.


It's worth noting that many of Obelisk's covers were designed and illustrated by Kahane, his wife, Marcelle, and their son, later known as Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press.

Obelisk

One of the best TV drama series of the 1990s (the original Cracker aside) was Between the Lines, about a trio of police officers involved in internal investigation, with all of the proeblems and conflicts of interest that entails. The main character, pants-man Detective Superintendent Tony Clark, was played very well indeed by the actor Neil Pearson.

Pearson has done a lot of great work since (including a memorable role in Drop the Dead Donkey), and he has also turned his hand to writing with great results. Liverpool University Press has recently published his Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press.

Mancunian Kahane set up Obelisk in Paris in 1929. The basic plan was to release excellent and controversial literature in English that took full advantage of France's liberal censorship laws, literature that would have been suppressed in the UK and America. This literature was funded by a series of pornographic pulp works which Obelisk also produced. Among the writers Obelisk published were Richard Aldington, Cyril Connolly, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell and Frank Harris.

Obelisk books were bought by English and American tourists, ex-pats and soldiers, and then smuggled or posted home under plain wrappers. Hence this simple but effective cover design, as though uncovered by some sharp-eyed customs officer:



Here are a couple of lovely-looking Henry Millers that Obelisk put out.



Note the warning at the bottom of the Tropic of Cancer cover.



UPDATE: Pedro Marques of the fascinating Montag points out that "Tropic"'s cover is by Kahane's son, the 15 year-old Maurice Girodias, the very same who would become famous as Olympia's (and "Lolita"'s) publisher.