A round of half-hearted applause, please, for the Toronto Public Library. After just nine or ten months it's come through with Neil Pearson's Obelisk. I picked it up today and from what I've read so far it was worth the wait. (Try as I might, I couldn't find a copy to buy, hardback or paper, anywhere in Hogtown.)
It's the history of Englishman Jack Kahane and his publishing house Obelisk Press in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s. Pearson writes that Kahane has been unjustifiably overlooked and I couldn't agree more. Kahane published early works by Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell and others and books by James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Cyril Connolly, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Harris and many more. He also published piles of money-spinning porn, employing the likes of literary writers such as Kay Boyle to churn it out.
Now then, if I can only persuade the TPL to release from its steely, steely stacks-only grip Boyle's Monday Night or Mon Ami Maigret by Georges Simenon or Bernard Poli's Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review or FMF's memoir Return to Yesterday or Ronald Weber's News of Paris or Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's Writing the Lost Generation or.......
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