Laugh and Grow Rich by Jack Kahane (Cecil Barr)

Laugh and Grow Rich
by Jack Kahane (Cecil Barr)

Book Description: Brentano's, New York, 1923. Hardcover. 12mo - over 6¾ - 7¾" tall. Hardcover, Brown cloth boards with Green title to cover and spine, deckle edges, 325 pages, First American Edition, 1923.

Book Conditon: Good, spine slightly cocked, lightly shaken, corners gently bumped with some slight fraying, boards rubbed, light shelf wear, a few small tears (about 1/8") at top and bottom spine extremes, previous owners name in pen to front end papers, soft pencil marks / notations to the following pages: 12, 13, 15, 17, 18,19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 31, 36, 38, 63, 67, 74, 79, 81, 83, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 128, 136, 225, 253, 258, 289, pages slightly tanned. No Dust Jacket.

Contents: Life, loves and adventures of an expatriate Englishman in post World War I in Paris. Author wrote the book "Daffodil" under the pseudonym Cecil Barr (he had several others). Kahane also founded Obelisk Press in Paris in 1929 to publish novels that were too risque to publish in the United States. A writer and publisher of 'db's ("dirty books"), Kahane mixed serious work with smut in his list; he was able to take advantage of a legal loop-hole whereby books published in France in English were not subject to the censorship otherwise practiced at the time, but were still subject to confiscation when importation was attempted. Henry Miller's 1934 novel," Tropic of Cancer," had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; Obelisk published five more books by Miller, as well as Richard Aldington's "Death of a Hero" (1930), Anaïs Nin's "Winter of Artifice"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 "Limericks" by Norman Douglas. He reprinted Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," which had been banned in Britain in 1928. Kahane published many forgotten authors like Norah James, Canadian poet Lawrence Dakin or Nadejda de Bragança. His wife Marcelle and their son Maurice (later known as Maurice Girodias) worked as cover illustrators for the imprint. -- Kahane died within days of the outbreak of World War Two, having just finished his final book, on 3 September 1939. This book, "Memoirs of a Booklegger," marked the end of Obelisk for several years, until his son (Girodias took his mother's birth name during the war to evade detection as a Jew) briefly revived it in the years following the war. This edition of Laugh and Grow Rich was published in New York by Bretano's in 1923, 325 Pages, Scarce, Collectible.

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