Obelisk Press

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.

Kahane published Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, which had explicit sexual passages and could not therefore be published in the United States; Obelisk published five more books by Miller, as well as Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero (1930), Anaïs Nin's Winter of Artifice (1939), Cyril Connolly's first book and only novel, The Rock Pool (1936), James Joyce's Haveth Childers Everywhere and Pomes Penyeach (1932), Frank Harris's My Life and Loves (1934) and Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book (1938), Squadron 95 by war hero Harold Buckley, James Hanley's Boy (1935) and Some Limericks by Norman Douglas.

Kahane also published many forgotten authors, including Norah James, Canadian poet Laurence Bradford Dakin and Nadejda de Bragança.

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).